Robert Ludlum - Bourne 2 - Bourne Supremecy

by The Bourne Supremacy [lit]

  'Suffice it to say that Washington had its Mayi Lais and its Medusa, while London has a far more recent military unit led by a homicidal psychotic who left hundreds slaughtered in his wake - few distinctions were made between the innocent and the guilty. He holds too many secrets, which, if exposed, could lead to violent eruptions of revenge throughout the Mideast and Africa. Practicality comes first, you know that. Or you should.'

  'He led? asked Bourne, bewildered.

  'No mere foot soldier he, Delta. He was a captain at twenty-two and a major at twenty-four when rank was next to impossible to obtain due to Whitehall's service economies. No doubt he'd be a brigadier or even a full general by now if his luck had held out.'

  That's what he told you?

  'In periodic drunken rages when ugly truths would surface - but never his name. They usually occurred once or twice a month, several days at a time when he'd block out his life in a drunken sea of self-loathing. Yet he was always coherent enough before the outbursts came, telling me to strap him down, confine him, protect him from himself... He would relive horrible events from his past, his voice hoarse, guttural, hollow. As the drink took over he would describe scenes of torture and mutilation, questioning prisoners with knives puncturing their eyes, and their wrists slit, ordering his captives to watch as their lives flowed out of their veins. So far as I could piece the fragments together, he commanded many of the most dangerous and savage raids against the fanatical uprisings of the late seventies and early eighties, from Yemen down to the bloodbaths in East Africa. In one moment of besotted jubilation he spoke of how Idi Amin himself would stop breathing at the mention of his name, so widespread was his reputation for matching - even surpassing - Amin's strategy of brutality.' D'Anjou paused, nodding his head slowly and arching his brows in the Gallic acceptance of the inexplicable. 'He was sub-human - is subhuman - but for all that a highly intelligent so-called officer and a gentleman. A complete paradox, a total contradiction of the civilized man... He'd laugh at the fact that his troops despised him and called him an animal, yet none ever dared to raise an official complaint.'

  'Why not?' asked Jason, stirred and pained at what he was hearing. 'Why didn't they report him?'

  'Because he always brought them out - most of them out -when the order of battle seemed hopeless.'

  'I see,' said Bourne, letting the remark ride with the mountain breezes. 'No, I don't see,' he cried angrily, as if suddenly, unexpectedly stung. 'Command structure is better than that. Why did his superiors put up with him? They had to know]'

  'As I understood his rantings, he got the jobs done when others couldn't - or wouldn't. He learned the secret we in Medusa learned long ago. Play by the enemy's most ruthless conditions. Change the rules according to the culture. After all, human life to others is not what it is to the Judaeo-Christian concept. How could it be? For so many, death is a. liberation from intolerable human conditions.'

  'Breathing is breathing^ insisted Jason, harshly. 'Being is being and thinking is thinking? added David Webb. 'He's a Neanderthal.'

  'No more than Delta was at certain times. And you got us out of how many-'

  'Don't say that!' protested the man from Medusa, cutting off the Frenchman. 'It wasn't the same.'

  'But certainly a variation,'insisted d'Anjou. 'Ultimately the motives do not really matter, do they? Only the results. Or don't you care to accept the truth? You lived it once. Does Jason Bourne now live with lies?'

  'At the moment I simply live - from day to day, from night to night - until it's over. One way or another.'

  'You must be clearer.'

  'When I want to or have to,' replied Bourne, icily. 'He's good, then, isn't he? Your commando - major without a name. Good at what he does.'

  'As good as Delta - perhaps better. You see, he has no conscience, none whatsoever. You, on the other hand, as violent as you were, showed flashes of compassion. Something inside you demanded it. "Spare this man," you would say. "He is a husband, a father, a brother. Incapacitate him, but let him live, let him function later"... My creation, your impostor, would never do that. He wants always the final solution - death in front of his eyes.'

  'What happened to him? Why did he kill those people in London? Being drunk's not a good enough reason, not where he's been.'

  'It is if it's a way of life you can't resign from.'

  'You keep your weapon in place unless you're threatened. Otherwise you invite the threats.'

  'He used no weapon. Only his hands that night in London.'

  "What?'

  'He stalked the streets looking for imagined enemies -that's what I gathered from his ravings. "It was in their eyes!" he'd scream. "It's always in the eyes! They know who I am, what I am." I tell you, Delta, it was both frightening and tedious, and I never got a name, never a specific reference other than Idi Amin, which any drunken soldier of fortune would use to further himself. To involve the British in Hong Kong would mean involving myself, and, after all, I certainly could not do that. The whole thing's so frustrating, so I went back to the ways of Medusa. Do it yourself. You taught us that, Delta. You constantly told us - ordered us - to use our imagination. That's what I did tonight. And I failed, as an old man might be expected to fail.'

  'Answer my question,' pressed Bourne. 'Why did he kill those people in London?'

  'For a reason as banal as it was pointless - and entirely too familiar. He'd been rejected, and his ego could not tolerate that rejection. I sincerely doubt that any other emotion was involved. As with all his indulgences, sexual activity is simply an animal release; no affection is involved, for he has no capacity for it. Man Dieu, he was so right!'

  'Again. What happened?'

  'He had returned, wounded, from some particularly brutal duty in Uganda expecting to take up where he left off with a woman in London - someone, I gather, rather high-born, as the English say, a throwback to his earlier days, no doubt. But she refused to see him and hired armed guards to protect her house in Chelsea after he called her. Two of those men were among the seven he killed that night. You see, she claimed his temper was uncontrollable and his bouts of drinking made him murderous, which, of course, they did. But for me he was the perfect contender. In Singapore I followed him outside a disreputable bar and saw him corner two murderous thugs in an alleyway - contrebandiers who had made a great deal of money with a narcotics sale in that filthy waterfront cave - and watched as he backed them against the wall, slashing both their throats with a single sweep of his knife and removing the proceeds from their pockets. I knew then that he had it all. I had found my Jason Bourne. I approached him slowly, silently, my hand extended, holding more money than he had extracted from his victims. We talked. It was the beginning.'

  'So Pygmalion created his Galatea, and the first contract you accepted became Aphrodite and gave it life. Bernard Shaw would love you, and I could kill you.'

  To what end? You came to find him tonight. I came to destroy him.'

  'Which is part of your story,' said David Webb, looking away from the Frenchman at the white-lit mountains, thinking of Maine and the life with Marie that had been so violently disrupted. 'You bastard? he suddenly shouted. 'I could kill you! Have you any idea what you've done?'

  'That is your story, Delta. Let me finish mine.'

  'Make it neat... Echo. That was your name, wasn't it? Echo?' The memories came back.

  'Yes, it was. You once told Saigon that you would not travel without "old Echo". I had to be with your team because I could discern trouble with the tribes and the village chiefs that others could not - which had little to do with my alphabetical symbol. Of course, it was nothing mystic. 1 had lived in the colonies for ten years. I knew when the Quan-si were lying.'

  'Finish your story,' ordered Bourne.

  'Betrayal,' said d'Anjou, palms outstretched. 'Just as you were created, I created my own Jason Bourne. And just as you went mad, my creation did the same. He turned on me; he became the reality that was my invention. Dismiss Galatea, Delta, he becam
e Frankenstein's monster with none of that creature's torment. He broke away from me and began to think for himself, do for himself. Once his desperation left him - with my inestimable help and a surgeon's knife - his sense of authority came back to him, as well as his arrogance,

  his ugliness. He considers me a trifle. That's what he called me, a "trifle"! An insignificant nonentity who used him! who created him!'

  'You mean he makes contracts on his own?'

  'Perverted contracts, grotesque and extraordinarily dangerous.'

  'But I traced him through you, through jour arrangements at the Kam Pek casino. Table Five. The telephone number of a hotel in Macao and a name.'

  'A method of contact he finds convenient to maintain. And why not? It's virtually security-proof and what can I do? Go to the authorities and say "See here, gentlemen, there's this fellow I'm somewhat responsible for who insists on using arrangements I created so he can be paid for killing someone." He even uses my conduit.'

  The Zhongguo ren with the fast hands and faster feet!

  D'Anjou looked at Jason. 'So that's how you did it, how you found this place. Delta hasn't lost his touch, n'est-cepas! Is the man alive?'

  'He is, and ten thousand dollars richer.'

  'He's a money-hungry cochon. But I can hardly criticize, I used him myself. I paid him five hundred to pick up and deliver a message.'

  'That brought your creation here tonight so you could kill him? What made you so sure he'd come?'

  'A Medusan's instinct, and skeletal knowledge of an extraordinary liaison he has made, a contact so profitable to him and so dangerous it could have all of Hong Kong at war, the entire colony paralysed.'

  'I heard that theory before,' said Jason, recalling Mr Allister's words spoken that early evening in Maine, 'and I still don't believe it. When killers kill each other, they're the ones who usually lose. They blow themselves away and informers come out of the woodwork thinking they might be next.'

  'If the victims are restricted to such a convenient pattern, certainly you are right. But not when they include a powerful political figure from a vast and aggressive nation.'

  Bourne stared at d'Anjou. 'China?' he asked softly.

  The Frenchman nodded. 'Five men were killed in the Tsim Sha Tsui-'

  'I know that.'

  'Four of those corpses were meaningless. Not the fifth. He was the Vice-Premier of the People's Republic.'

  'Good God!' Jason frowned, the image of a car corning to him. A car with its windows blacked out and an assassin inside. An official government vehicle of the Chinese government.

  'My sources tell me that the wires burned between Government House and Beijing, practicality and face winning out - this time. After all, what was the Vice-Premier doing in Kowloon, to begin with? Was such an august leader of the Central Committee also one of the corrupted? But, as I say, that is this time. No, Delta, my creation must be destroyed before he accepts another contract that could plunge us all into an abyss.'

  'Sorry, Echo. Not killed. Taken and brought to someone else.'

  That is your story, then?' asked d'Anjou.

  'Part of it, yes.'

  Tell me.'

  'Only what you have to know. My wife was kidnapped and brought to Hong Kong. To get her back - and I'll get her back, or every goddamned one of you will die - I have to deliver your son-of-a-bitch creation. And now I'm one step closer because you're going to help me, and I mean really help me. If you don't-'

  Threats are unnecessary, Delta,' interrupted the former Medusan. 'I know what you can do. I've seen you do it. You want him for your reasons and I want him for mine. The order of battle is joined.'

  17

  Catherine Staples insisted that her dinner guest had another vodka martini, demurring for herself as her glass was still half full.

  'It's also half empty,' said the thirty-two-year-old American attach‚, smiling wanly, nervously, pushing his dark hair away from his forehead. That's stupid of me, Catherine,' he added. 'I'm sorry, but I can't forget that you saw the photographs -never mind that you saved my career and probably my life -it's those goddamned photographs.'

  'No one else saw them except Inspector Ballantyne.'

  'But you saw them.'

  'I'm old enough to be your mother.'

  'That compounds it. I look at you and feel so ashamed, so damned dirty.'

  'My former husband, wherever he is, once said to me that there was absolutely nothing that could or should be considered dirty in sexual encounters. I suspect there was a motive for his making the statement, but I happen to think he was right. Look, John, put them out of your mind. I have.'

  'I'll do my best.' A waiter approached; the drink was ordered by signal. 'Since your call this afternoon I've been a basket case. I thought more had surfaced. That was a twenty-four-hour period of pure outer space.'

  'You were heavily and insidiously drugged. On that level you weren't responsible. And I'm sorry, I should have told you it had nothing to do with our previous business.'

  'If you had I might have earned my salary for the last five hours.'

  'It was forgetful and cruel of me. I apologize.'

  'Accepted. You're a great girl, Catherine.'

  'I appeal to your infantile regressions.'

  'Don't bet too much money on that.'

  'Then don't you have a fifth martini.'

  'It's only my second.'

  'A little flattery never hurt anyone.'

  They laughed quietly. The waiter returned with John Nelson's drink; he thanked the man and turned back to Staples. 'I have an idea that the prospect of flattery didn't get me a free meal at The Plume. This place is out of my range.'

  'Mine, too, but not Ottawa's. You'll be listed as a terribly important person. In fact, you are.'

  'That's nice. No one ever told me. I'm in a pretty good job over here because I learned Chinese. I figured that with all those Ivy League recruits, a boy from Upper Iowa College in old Fayette, Big I, ought to have an edge somewhere.'

  'You have it, Johnny. The consulates like you. Our out-posted "Embassy Row" thinks very highly of you, and they should.'

  'If they do, it's thanks to you and Ballantyne. And only you two.' Nelson paused, sipped his martini, and looked at Staples over the rim of the glass. He lowered his drink and spoke again. 'What is it, Catherine? Why am I important?'

  'Because I need your help.'

  'Anything. Anything I can do.'

  'Not so fast, Johnny. It's deep-water time and I could be drowning myself.'

  'If anyone deserves a lifeline from me, it's you. Apart from minor problems, our two countries live next door to each other and basically like each other - we're on the same side. What is it? How can I help youT

  'Marie St Jacques... Webb,' said Catherine, studying the attache's face.

  Nelson blinked, his eyes roving aimlessly in thought. 'Nothing,' he said. The name doesn't mean anything to me.'

  'All right, let's try Raymond Havilland.'

  '0h, now that's another barrel of pickled herring.' The attach‚ widened his eyes and cocked his head. 'We've all been scuttle-butting about him. He hasn't come to the consulate, hasn't even called our head honcho, who wants to get his picture in the papers with him. After all, Havilland's a class act - kind of metaphysical in this business. He's been around since the loaves and the fishes, and he probably engineered the whole scam.'

  'Then you're aware that over the years your aristocratic ambassador has been involved with more than diplomatic negotiations.'

  'Nobody ever says it, but only the naive accept his above-the-fray posture.'

  'You are good, Johnny.'

  'Merely observant. I do earn some of my pay. What's the connection between a name I do know and one that I don't?'

  'I wish I knew. Do you have any idea why Havilland is over here? Any rumours you've picked up?'

  'I've no idea why he's here, but I do know you won't find him at a hotel.'

  'I assume he has wealthy friends-'


  'I'm sure he does, but he's not staying with them, either.'

  'Oh?'

  'The consulate quietly leased a house in Victoria Peak, and a second marine contingent was flown over from Hawaii for guard duty. None of us in the upper-middle ranks knew about it until a few days ago when one of those dumb things happened. Two marines were having dinner in the Wanchai and one of them paid the bill with a temporary cheque drawn on a Hong Kong bank. Well, you know servicemen and cheques; the manager gave this corporal a hard time. The kid said neither he nor his buddy had had time to round up cash and that the cheque was perfectly good. Why didn't the manager call the consulate and talk to a military attach‚?'