“I was lying.… Lying.” His reserves had been used up. There was nothing now but what was so.
Sealfont laughed softly. It wasn’t the laugh Matlock was used to hearing from him. There was a cruelty he’d not heard before.
“Weren’t you clever? But you’re ultimately weak. I knew that from the beginning. You were the government’s perfect choice, for you have no really firm commitments. They called it mobility. I knew it to be unconcerned flexibility. You talk but that’s all you do. It’s meaningless.… You’re very representative, you know.” Sealfont spoke over his shoulder toward the paths. “All right, all of you! Dr. Matlock won’t be in a position to reveal any names, any identities. Come out of your hutches, you rabbits!”
“Augh …”
The guttural cry was short, punctuating the stillness. Sealfont whipped around.
Then there was another gasp, this the unmistakable sound of a human windpipe expunging its last draft of air.
And another, this coupled with the beginnings of a scream.
“Who is it? Who’s up there?” Sealfont rushed to the path from which the last cry came.
He was stopped by the sound of a terrifying shout—cut short—from another part of the sanctuary. He raced back; the beginnings of panic were jarring his control.
“Who’s up there?! Where are all of you? Come down here!”
The silence returned. Sealfont stared at Matlock.
“What have you done? What have you done, you unimportant little man? Whom have you brought with you? Who is up there? Answer me!”
Even if he’d been capable, there was no need for Matlock to reply. From a path at the far end of the garden, Julian Dunois walked into view.
“Good morning, Nimrod.”
Sealfont’s eyes bulged. “Who are you? Where are my men?!”
“The name is Jacques Devereaux, Heysoú Daumier, Julian Dunois—take your choice. You were no match for us. You had a complement of ten, I had eight. No match. Your men are dead and how their bodies are disposed of is no concern of yours.”
“Who are you?”
“Your enemy.”
Sealfont ripped open his coat with his left hand, plunging his right inside. Dunois shouted a warning. Matlock found himself lurching forward toward the man he’d revered for a decade. Lunging at him with only one thought, one final objective, if it had to be the end of his own life.
To kill.
The face was next to his. The Lincoln-like face now contorted with fear and panic. He brought his right hand down on it like the claw of a terrified animal. He ripped into the flesh and felt the blood spew out of the distorted mouth.
He heard the shattering explosion and felt a sharp, electric pain in his left shoulder. But still he couldn’t stop.
“Get off, Matlock! For God’s sake, get off!”
He was being pulled away. Pulled away by huge black muscular arms. He was thrown to the ground, the heavy arms holding him down. And through it all he heard the cries, the terrible cries of pain and his name being repeated over and over again.
“Jamie … Jamie … Jamie …”
He lurched upward, using every ounce of strength his violence could summon. The muscular black arms were taken by surprise; he brought his legs up in crushing blows against the ribs and spines above him.
For a few brief seconds, he was free.
He threw himself forward on the hard surface, pounding his arms and knees against the stone. Whatever had happened to him, whatever was meant by the stinging pain, now spreading throughout the whole left side of his body, he had to reach the girl on the ground. The girl who had been through such terror for him.
“Pat!”
The pain was more than he could bear. He fell once more, but he had reached her hand. They held each other’s hands, each trying desperately to give comfort to the other, fully aware that both might die at that moment.
Suddenly Matlock’s hand went limp.
All was darkness for him.
He opened his eyes and saw the large black kneeling in front of him. He had been propped up into a sitting position at the side of a marble bench. His shirt had been removed; his left shoulder throbbed.
“The pain, I’m sure, is far more serious than the wound,” said the black. “The upper left section of your body was badly bruised in the automobile, and the bullet penetrated below your left shoulder cartilage. Compounded that way, the pain would be severe.”
“We gave you a local anesthetic. It should help.” The speaker was Julian Dunois, standing to his right. “Miss Ballantyne has been taken to a doctor. He’ll remove the tapes. He’s black and sympathetic, but not so much so to treat a man with a bullet wound. We’ve radioed our own doctor in Torrington. He should be here in twenty minutes.”
“Why didn’t you wait for him to help Pat?”
“Frankly, we have to talk. Briefly, but in confidence. Secondly, for her own sake, those tapes had to be removed as quickly as possible.”
“Where’s Sealfont?”
“He’s disappeared. That’s all you know, all you’ll ever know. It’s important that you understand that. Because, you see, if we must, we will carry out our threat against you and Miss Ballantyne. We don’t wish to do that.… You and I, we are not enemies.”
“You’re wrong. We are.”
“Ultimately, perhaps. That would seem inevitable. Right now, however, we’ve served each other in a moment of great need. We acknowledge it. We trust you do also.”
“I do.”
“Perhaps we’ve even learned from each other.”
Matlock looked into the eyes of the black revolutionary. “I understand things better. I don’t know what you could have learned from me.”
The revolutionary laughed gently. “That an individual, by his actions—his courage, if you like—rises above the stigma of labels.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Ponder it. It’ll come to you.”
“What happens now? To Pat? To me? I’ll be arrested the minute I’m seen.”
“I doubt that sincerely. Within the hour, Greenberg will be reading a document prepared by my organization. By me, to be precise. I suspect the contents will become part of a file buried in the archives. It’s most embarrassing. Morally, legally, and certainly politically. Too many profound errors were made.… We’ll act this morning as your intermediary. Perhaps it would be a good time for you to use some of your well-advertised money and go with Miss Ballantyne on a long, recuperative journey.… I believe that will be agreed upon with alacrity. I’m sure it will.”
“And Sealfont? What happens to him. Are you going to kill him?”
“Does Nimrod deserve to die? Don’t bother to answer; we’ll not discuss the subject. Suffice it to say he’ll remain alive until certain questions are answered.”
“Have you any idea what’s going to happen when he’s found to be missing?”
“There will be explosions, ugly rumors. About a great many things. When icons are shattered, the believers panic. So be it. Carlyle will have to live with it.… Rest, now. The doctor will be here soon.” Dunois turned his attention to a uniformed Negro who had come up to him and spoken softly. The kneeling black who had bandaged his wound stood up. Matlock watched the tall, slender figure of Julian Dunois, quietly, confidently issuing his instructions, and felt the pain of gratitude. It was made worse because Dunois suddenly took on another image.
It was the figure of death.
“Dunois?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful.”
EPILOGUE
The blue-green waters of the Caribbean mirrored the hot afternoon sun in countless thousands of swelling, blinding reflections. The sand was warm to the touch, soft under the feet. This isolated stretch of the island was at peace with itself and with a world beyond that it did not really acknowledge.
Matlock walked down to the edge of the water and let the miniature waves wash over his ankles. Like the sand on the beach, the water was wa
rm.
He carried a newspaper sent to him by Greenberg. Part of a newspaper, actually.
KILLINGS IN CARLYLE, CONN.
23 SLAIN, BLACKS AND WHITES, TOWN STUNNED, FOLLOWS DISAPPEARANCE OF UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
CARLYLE, MAY 10—On the outskirts of this small university town, in a section housing large, old estates, a bizarre mass killing took place yesterday. Twenty-three men were slain; the federal authorities have speculated the killings were the result of an ambush that claimed many lives of both the attackers and the attacked.…
There followed a cold recitation of identities, short summaries of police file associations.
Julian Dunois was among them.
The specter of death had not been false; Dunois hadn’t escaped. The violence he engendered had to be the violence that would take his life.
The remainder of the article contained complicated speculations on the meaning and the motives of the massacre’s strange cast of characters. And the possible connection to the disappearance of Adrian Sealfont.
Speculations only. No mention of Nimrod, nothing of himself; no word of any long-standing federal investigation. Not the truth; nothing of the truth.
Matlock heard his cottage door open, and he turned around. Pat was standing on the small veranda fifty yards away over the dune. She waved and started down the steps toward him.
She was dressed in shorts and a light silk blouse; she was barefoot and smiling. The bandages had been removed from her legs and arms, and the Caribbean sun had tanned her skin to a lovely bronze. She had devised a wide orange headband to cover the wounds above her forehead.
She would not marry him. She said there would be no marriage out of pity, out of debt—real or imagined. But Matlock knew there would be a marriage. Or there would be no marriages for either of them. Julian Dunois had made it so.
“Did you bring cigarettes?” he asked.
“No. No cigarettes,” she replied. “I brought matches.”
“That’s cryptic.”
“I used that word—cryptic—with Jason. Do you remember?”
“I do. You were mad as hell.”
“You were spaced out … In hen. Let’s walk down to the jetty.”
“Why did you bring matches?” He took her hand, putting the newspaper under his arm.
“A funeral pyre. Archeologists place great significance in funeral pyres.”
“What?”
“You’ve been carrying around that damned paper all day. I want to burn it.” She smiled at him, gently.
“Burning it won’t change what’s in it.”
Pat ignored his observation. “Why do you think Jason sent it to you? I thought the whole idea was several weeks of nothing. No newspapers, no radios, no contact with anything but warm water and white sand. He made the rules and he broke them.”
“He recommended the rules and knew they were difficult to live by.”
“He should have let someone else break them. He’s not as good a friend as I thought he was.”
“Maybe he’s a better one.”
“That’s sophistry.” She squeezed his hand. A single, overextended wave lapped across their bare feet. A silent gull swooped down from the sky into the water offshore; its wings flapped against the surface, its neck shook violently. The bird ascended screeching, no quarry in its beak.
“Greenberg knows I’ve got a very unpleasant decision to make.”
“You’ve made it. He knows that, too.”
Matlock looked at her. Of course Greenberg knew; she knew, too, he thought. “There’ll be a lot more pain; perhaps more than justified.”
“That’s what they’ll tell you. They’ll tell you to let them do it their way. Quietly, efficiently, with as little embarrassment as possible. For everyone.”
“Maybe it’s best; maybe they’re right.”
“You don’t believe that for a second.”
“No, I don’t.”
They walked in silence for a while. The jetty was in front of them, its rocks placed decades, perhaps centuries ago, to restrain a long-forgotten current. It was a natural fixture now.
As Nimrod had become a natural fixture, a logical extension of the anticipated; undesirable but nevertheless expected. To be fought in deep cover.
Mini-America … just below the surface.
Company policy, man.
Everywhere.
The hunters, builders. The killers and their quarry were making alliances.
Look to the children. They understand … We’ve enrolled them.
The leaders never learn.
A microcosm of the inevitable? Made unavoidable because the needs were real? Had been real for years?
And still the leaders would not learn.
“Jason said once that truth is neither good nor bad. Simply truth. That’s why he sent me this.” Matlock sat down on a large flat rock; Pat stood beside him. The tide was coming in and the sprays of the small waves splashed upward. Pat reached over and took the two pages of the newspaper.
“This is the truth then.” A statement.
“Their truth. Their judgment. Assign obvious labels and continue the game. The good guys and the bad guys and the posse will reach the pass on time. Just in time. This time.”
“What’s your truth?”
“Go back and tell the story. All of it.”
“They’ll disagree. They’ll give you reasons why you shouldn’t. Hundreds of them.”
“They won’t convince me.”
“Then they’ll be against you. They’ve threatened; they won’t accept interference. That’s what Jason wants you to know.”
“That’s what he wants me to think about.”
Pat held the pages of the newspaper in front of her and struck a wooden island match on the dry surface of a rock.
The paper burned haltingly, retarded by the Caribbean spray.
But it burned.
“That’s not a very impressive funeral pyre,” said Matlock.
“It’ll do until we get back.”
Read on for an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s
The Bourne Identity
1
The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.
Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.
A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.
The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.
He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.
And there was heat,
a strange moist heat at his temple that seared through the freezing water that kept swallowing him, a fire where no fire should burn. There was ice, too; an ice-like throbbing in his stomach and his legs and his chest, oddly warmed by the cold sea around him. He felt these things, acknowledging his own panic as he felt them. He could see his own body turning and twisting, arms and feet working frantically against the pressures of the whirlpool. He could feel, think, see, perceive panic and struggle—yet strangely there was peace. It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.
Then another form of panic spread through him, surging through the heat and the ice and the uninvolved recognition. He could not submit to peace! Not yet! It would happen any second now; he was not sure what it was, but it would happen. He had to be there!
He kicked furiously, clawing at the heavy walls of water above, his chest burning. He broke surface, thrashing to stay on top of the black swells. Climb up! Climb up!
A monstrous rolling wave accommodated; he was on the crest, surrounded by pockets of foam and darkness. Nothing. Turn! Turn!
It happened. The explosion was massive; he could hear it through the clashing waters and the wind, the sight and the sound somehow his doorway to peace. The sky lit up like a fiery diadem and within that crown of fire, objects of all shapes and sizes were blown through the light into the outer shadows.
He had won. Whatever it was, he had won.
Suddenly he was plummeting downward again, into an abyss again. He could feel the rushing waters crash over his shoulders, cooling the white-hot heat at his temple, warming the ice-cold incisions in his stomach and his legs and.…
His chest. His chest was in agony! He had been struck—the blow crushing, the impact sudden and intolerable. It happened again! Let me alone. Give me peace.
And again!
And he clawed again, and kicked again … until he felt it. A thick, oily object that moved only with the movements of the sea. He could not tell what it was, but it was there and he could feel it, hold it.
The Matlock Paper Page 31