'Someone saw where you worked and what you did for a living and thought he'd add a little upgraded verbiage. Local colour, in your case. ' Then Panov exploded. 'My God, what are they doing?'
'Locking me into a starting gate,' said Webb softly. They're forcing me to go after whatever it is they want . '
'Sons of bitches!'
'It's called recruitment. ' David stared at the wall. 'Stay away. Mo, there's nothing you can do. They've got all their pieces in place. I'm recruited. ' He hung up.
Dazed, Webb walked out of his small office and stood in the Victorian hallway surveying the upturned furniture and the broken lamps, china and glass strewn across the floor of the living room beyond. Then words spoken by Panov earlier in the terrible conversation came to him: They're so incriminating. '
approached the front door and opened it. He forced himself to look at the hand print in the centre of the upper panel, the dried blood dull and dark in the light of the carriage lamps. Then he drew closer and examined it.
It was the imprint of a hand but not a handprint. There was the outline of a hand – the impression, the palm and the extended fingers – but no breaks in the bloody form, no creases or indentations that a bleeding hand pressed against hard wood would reveal, no identifying marks, no isolated parts of the flesh held in place so as to stamp its own particular characteristics. It was like a flat, coloured shadow from a piece of stained glass, no planes other than the single impression. A glove? A rubber glove?
David drew his eyes away and slowly turned to the staircase in the middle of the hallway, his thoughts haltingly centring on other words spoken by another man. A strange man with a mesmerizing voice.
Perhaps you should examine the note further.... It may all become clearer to you with help – psychiatric help.
Webb suddenly screamed, the terror within him growing as he ran to the staircase and raced up the steps to the bedroom, where he stared at the typewritten note on the bed. He picked it up with sickening fear and carried it to his wife's dressing table. He turned on the lamp and studied the print under the light.
If the heart within him could have burst, it would have blown apart. Instead, Jason Bourne coldly examined the note before him.
The slightly bent, irregular rs were there, as well as the ds, the upper staves incomplete, breaking off at the halfway mark.
Bastards!
The note had been written on his own typewriter. Recruitment.
6
He sat on the rocks above the beach, knowing he had to think clearly. He had to define what was before him and what was expected of him and then how to out-think whoever was manipulating him. Above all, he knew he could not give in to panic, even the perception of panic – a panicked man was dangerous, a risk to be eliminated. If he went over the edge, he would only ensure the death of Marie and himself; it was that simple. Everything was so delicate – violently delicate.
David Webb was out of the question. Jason Bourne had to assume control. Jesus! It was crazy! Mo Panov had told him to walk on the beach – as Webb – and now he had to sit there as Bourne, thinking things out as Bourne would think them out – he had to deny one part of himself and accept the opposite.
Strangely, it was not impossible, nor even intolerable, for Marie was out there. His love, his only love – Don't think that way. Jason Bourne spoke: she is a valuable possession taken from you! Get her back. Jason Bourne spoke. No, not a possession, my life!
Jason Bourne: Then break all the rules! Find her! Bring her back to you!
David Webb: I don't know how. Help me!
Use me! Use what you've learned from me. You've got the tools, you've had them for years. You were the best in Medusa. Above all, there was control. You preached that. You lived that. And you stayed alive.
Control.
Such a simple word. Such an incredible demand.
Webb climbed off the rocks and once again went up the path through the wild grass to the street and started back towards the old Victorian house, loathing its sudden, frightening, unfair emptiness. As he walked a name flashed across his thoughts; then it returned and remained fixed. Slowly the face belonging to that name came into focus – very slowly, for the man aroused hatred in David that was no less acute for the sadness he also evoked.
Alexander Conklin had tried to kill him – twice – and each time he had nearly succeeded. And Alex Conklin – according to his deposition as well as his own numerous psychiatric sessions with Mo Panov and what vague memories David could provide – had been a close friend of Foreign Service Officer Webb and his Thai wife and their children in Cambodia a lifetime ago. When death had struck from the skies, filling the river with circles of blood, David had fled blindly to Saigon, his rage uncontrollable, and it was his friend in the Central Intelligence Agency, Alex Conklin, who found a place for him in the illegitimate battalion they called Medusa.
If you can survive the jungle training, you'll be a man they want. But watch them – every goddamned one of them, every goddamned minute. They'll cut your arm off for a watch. Those were the words Webb recalled, and he specifically recalled that they had been spoken by the voice of Alexander Conklin.
He had survived the brutal training and became Delta. No other name, just a progression in the alphabet. Delta One. Then after the war, Delta became Cain. Cain is for Delta and Carlos is for Cain. That was the challenge hurled at Carlos the assassin. Created by Treadstone 71, a killer named Cain would catch the Jackal.
It was as Cain, a name the underworld of Europe knew in reality was Asia's Jason Bourne, that Conklin had betrayed his friend. A simple act of faith on Alex's part could have made all the difference, but Alex could not find it within himself to provide it; his own bitterness precluded that particular charity. He believed the worst of his former friend because his own sense of martyrdom made him want to believe it. It raised his own broken self-esteem, convincing him that he was better than his former friend. In his work with Medusa, Conklin's foot had been shattered by a land mine, and his brilliant career as a field strategist was cut short. A crippled man could not stay in the field where a growing reputation might take him up the ladders scaled by such men as Alien Dulles and James Angleton, and Conklin did not possess the skills for 'the bureaucratic in-fighting demanded at Langley. He withered, a once extraordinary tactician left to watch inferior talents pass him by, his expertise sought only in secrecy, the head of Medusa always in the background, dangerous, someone to be kept at arm's length.
Two years of imposed castration until a man known as the Monk – a Rasputin of covert operations – sought him out because one David Webb had been selected for an extraordinary assignment and Conklin had known Webb for years. Treadstone 71 was created, Jason Bourne became its product and Carlos the Jackal its target. And for thirty-two months Conklin monitored this most secret of classified operations, until the scenario fell apart with Jason Bourne's disappearance and the withdrawal of over five million dollars from Treadstone's Zurich account.
With no evidence to the contrary, Conklin presumed the worst. The legendary Bourne had turned; life in the nether world had become too much for him and the temptation to come in from the cold with over five million dollars had been too alluring to resist. Especially for one known as the chameleon, a multilingual deep-cover specialist who could change appearances and lifestyles with so little effort that he could literally vanish. A trap for an assassin had been baited and then the bait had vanished, revealing a scheming thief. For the crippled Alexander Conklin this was not only the act of a traitor, but intolerable treachery. Considering everything that had been done to him, his foot now no more than a painfully awkward dead weight surgically encased in stolen flesh, a once brilliant career a shambles, his personal life filled with a loneliness that only a total commitment to the Agency could bring about – a devotion not reciprocated what right had anyone else to turn? What other man had given what he had given?
So his once close friend, David Webb, became the enemy, Jason Bourne
. Not merely the enemy, but an obsession. He had helped create the myth; he would destroy it. His first attempt was with two hired killers on the outskirts of Paris.
David shuddered at the memory, still seeing a defeated Conklin limp away, his crippled figure in Webb's gunsight.
The second try was blurred for David. Perhaps he would never recall it completely. It had taken place at the Treadstone sterile house on New York's 71st Street, an ingenious trap mounted by Conklin, which was aborted by Webb's hysterical efforts to survive and, oddly enough, the presence of Carlos the Jackal.
Later, when the truth was known, that the 'traitor' had no treason in him but instead a mental aberration called amnesia, Conklin fell apart. During David's agonizing months of convalescence in Virginia, Alex tried repeatedly to see his former friend, to explain, to tell his part of the bloody story – to apologize with every fibre of his being.
David, however, had no forgiveness in his soul.
'If he walks through that door I'll kill him,' had been his words.
That would change now, thought Webb as he quickened his pace down the street towards the house. Whatever Conklin's faults and duplicities, few men in the intelligence community had the insights and the sources he had developed over a lifetime of commitment. David had not thought about Alex in months; he thought about him now, suddenly remembering the last time his name came up in conversation. Mo Panov had rendered his verdict.
'I can't help him because he doesn't want to be helped. He'll carry his last bottle of sour mash up to that great big black operations room in the sky bombed out of his mercifully dead skull. If he lasts to his retirement at the end of the year, I'll be astonished. On the other hand, if he stays pickled they may
put him in a straitjacket and that'll keep him out of traffic. I swear I don't know how he gets to work every day. That pension is one hell of a survival-therapy – better than anything Freud ever left us. '
Panov had spoken those words no more than five months ago. Conklin was still in place.
I'm sorry, Mo. His survival one-way or the other doesn't bother me. So far as I'm concerned, his status is dead.
It was not dead now, thought David, as he ran up the steps of the oversized Victorian porch. Alex Conklin was very much alive, whether drunk or not, and even if he was preserved in bourbon, he had his sources, those contacts he had cultivated during a lifetime of devotion to the shadow world that ultimately rejected him. Within that world debts were owed; and they were paid out of fear.
Alexander Conklin. Number I on Jason Bourne's hit list.
He opened the door and once again stood in the hallway, but his eyes did not see the wreckage. Instead, the logician in him ordered him to go back into his study and begin the procedures; there was nothing but confusion without imposed order, and confusion led to questions – he could not afford them. Everything had to be precise within the reality he was creating so as to divert the curious from the reality that was.
He sat down at the desk and tried to focus his thoughts. There was the ever-present spiral notebook from the College Shop in front of him. He opened the thick cover to the first lined page and reached for a pencil... He could not pick it up! His hand shook so much that his whole body trembled. He held his breath and made a fist, clenching it until his fingernails cut into his flesh. He closed his eyes, then opened them, forcing his hand to return to the pencil, commanding it to do its job. Slowly, awkwardly, his fingers gripped the thin, yellow shaft and moved the pencil into position. The words were barely legible, but they were there.
The university phone president and dean of studies. Family crisis, not Canada can he traced. Invent a brother in Europe, perhaps. Yes, Europe. Leave of absence brief leave of absence. Right away. Will stay in touch.
House call rental agent, same story. Ask Jack to check periodically. He has key. Turn thermostat to 60°.
Mail – fill out form at Post Office. Hold all mail.
Newspapers – cancel.
The little things, the goddamned little things – the unimportant daily trivia became so terribly important and had to be taken care of so that there would be no sign whatsoever of an abrupt departure without a planned return. That was vital; he had to remember it with every word he spoke. Questions had to be kept to a minimum, the inevitable speculations reduced to manageable proportions, which meant he had to confront the obvious conclusion that his recent bodyguards somehow led to his leave of absence. To defuse the connection, the most plausible way was to emphasize the short duration of that absence and to face the issue with a straightforward dismissal such as 'Incidentally, if you're wondering whether this has anything to do with... well, don't. That's a closed book; it didn't have much merit anyway. ' He would know better how to respond while talking to both the university's president and the dean; their own reactions would guide him. If anything could guide him. If he was capable of thinking! Don't slide back! Keep going. Move that pencil! Fill out the page with things to do – then another page, and another! Passports, initials on wallets or billfolds or shirts to correspond with the names being used; airline reservations – connecting flights, no direct routes – oh, God! To where! Marie! Where are you?
Stop it! Control yourself. You are capable, you must be capable. You have no choice, so be what you once were. Feel ice. Be ice.
Without warning, the shell he was building around himself was shattered by the ear-splitting sound of the telephone inches from his hand on the desk. He looked at it, swallowing, wondering if he were capable of sounding remotely normal. It rang again, a terrible insistence in its ring. You have no choice.
He picked it up, gripping the receiver with such force that his knuckles turned white. He managed to get out the single word. 'Yes? ,
This is the mobile-air operator, satellite transmission-'
'Who? What did you say?"
'I have a mid-flight radio call for a Mr. Webb. Are you Mr. Webb, sir?'
'Yes. '
And then the world he knew blew up in a thousand jagged mirrors, each an image of screaming torment.
'David!'
'Marie?'
'Don't panic, darling! Do you hear me, don't panic!' Her voice came through the static; she was trying not to shout but could not help herself.
'Are you all right? The note said you were hurt – wounded!'
'I'm all right. A few scratches, that's all. '
'Where are you?
'Over the ocean, I'm sure they'll tell you that much. I don't know; I was sedated.'
'Oh, Jesus! I can't stand it! They took you away!'
'Pull yourself together, David. I know what this is doing to you, but they don't. Do you understand what I'm saying? They don't!'
She was sending him a coded message; it was not hard to decipher. He had to be the man he hated. He had to be Jason Bourne, and the assassin was alive and well and residing in the body of David Webb.
'All right. Yes, all right. I've been going out of my mind!'
'Your voice is being amplified-'
'Naturally. '
They're letting me speak to you so you'll know I'm alive. '
'Have they hurt you?"
'Not intentionally. '
'What the hell are "scratches"?
'I struggled. I fought. And I was brought up on a ranch. '
'Oh, my God-"
'David, please! Don't let them do this to you!'
To me? It's you!'
'I know, darling. I think they're testing you, can you understand that?'
Again the message. Be Jason Bourne for both their sakes, for both their lives. 'All right. Yes, all right. ' He lessened the intensity of his voice, trying to control himself. 'When did it happen?' he asked.
This morning, about an hour after you left . '
This morning"? Christ, all day! How?'
They came to the door. Two men-'
'Who?'
'I'm permitted to say they're from the Far East. Actually, I don't know any more than that. They asked me to accompan
y them and I refused. I ran into the kitchen and saw a knife. I stabbed one of them in the hand. '
The handprint on the door.. . '
'I don't understand. '
'It doesn't matter. '
"A man wants to talk to you, David. Listen to him, but not in anger not in a rage – can you understand that?
'All right Yes, all right. I understand. '
The man's voice came on the line. It was hesitant but precise, almost British in its delivery, someone who had been taught English by an Englishman, or by someone who had lived in the UK. Nevertheless, it was identifiably Oriental; the accent was southern China, the pitch, the short vowels and sharp consonants sounding of Cantonese.
'We do not care to harm your wife, Mr. Webb but if it is necessary, it will be unavoidable. '
'I wouldn't, if I were you,' said David coldly.
'Jason Bourne speaks?'
'He speaks. '
The acknowledgement is the first step in our understanding. '
'What understanding?
'You took something of great value from a man. '
'You've taken something of great value from me. '
'She is alive. '
'She'd better stay that way. '
'Another is dead. You killed her. '
'Are you sure about that?' Bourne would not agree readily unless it served his purpose to do so.
'We are very sure. '
'What's your proof?'
'You were seen. A tall man who stayed in the shadows and raced through the hotel corridors and across fire escapes with the movements of a mountain cat. '
'Then I wasn't really seen, was I? Nor could I have been. I was thousands of miles away. ' Bourne would always give himself an option.
'In these times of fast aircraft, what is distance?' The Oriental paused, then added sharply. 'You cancelled your duties for a period of five days two and a half weeks ago. '
'And if I told you I attended a symposium on the Sung and Yuan dynasties down in Boston – which was very much in line with my duties-'
'I am startled,' interrupted the man courteously, 'that Jason Bourne would employ such a lamentably feeble excuse. '
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