"Kurt, do you hear me?"
"I am not deaf." The fingers at the end of the arm were slightly cupped as if the hand was preparing to reach out for something unnameable and unknown.
"Well, are you going to answer it?" Madeleine called down.
"Whether I answer it or not is none of your goddamn business!" he shouted with vehemence. "Will you go to bed now." A moment later he heard the satisfying whisper of the basement door closing. Why couldn't she leave him alone at a time like this? he fumed. Thirty years married, you'd think she'd know better.
He returned to his work, fitting the arm with the cupped hand to the shoulder of the torso, red to red, deciding on the final position. This was how the DCI dealt with situations over which he had no control. He played god with his miniature soldiers, buying them, cutting them to pieces, then, later, reconstructing them, molding them into the positions that suited him. Here, in the world he himself had created, he controlled everyone and everything.
The phone continued to ring in its mechanical, monotonous fashion and the DCI gritted his teeth, as if the sound was abrasive. What marvelous deeds had been accomplished in the days when he and Alex had been young! The mission inside Russia when they had almost landed in the Lubyanka, running the Berlin Wall, extracting secrets from the Staasi, vetting the defector from the KGB in the Vienna safe house, discovering that he was a double. The killing of Bernd, their longtime contact, the compassion with which they had told his wife that they would take care of Bernd's son Dieter, take him back to America, put him through college. They had done precisely that and had been rewarded for their generosity. Dieter had never returned to his mother. Instead, he had joined the Agency, had for many years been the director of the Science & Technology Directorate until the fatal motorcycle accident.
Where had that life gone? Laid to rest in Bernd's grave, and Dieter's— now Alex's. How had it been reduced so quickly to flashpoints in his memory? Time and responsibilities had crippled him, no question. He was an old man now, in some respects with more power, yes, but the daring deeds of yesterday, the elan with which he and Alex had bestrode the secret world, changing the fate of nations, had burned to ash, never to return.
The DCI's fist hammered the tin soldier into a cripple. Then and only then did he pick up the phone.
"Yes, Martin."
There was a weariness in his voice Lindros picked up on immediately. "Are you all right, sir?"
"No, I fucking well am not all right!" This was what the DCI had wanted. Another opportunity to vent his anger and frustration. "How could I be all right given the circumstances?"
"I'm sorry, sir."
"No, you're not," the DCI said waspishly. "You couldn't be. You have no idea." He stared at the soldier he had crushed, his mind hounded by past glories. "What is it you want?"
"You asked for an update, sir."
"Did I?" The DCI rested his head in his hand. "Yes, I suppose I did. What have you found?"
"The third car in Conklin's driveway belongs to David Webb." The DCI's keen ear responded to a tone in Lindros' voice. "But?"
"But there's no sign of Webb."
"Of course there isn't."
"He was definitely there, though. We gave the dogs a sniff at the interior of his car. They found his scent on the property and followed it into the woods but lost it at a stream."
The DCI closed his eyes. Alexander Conklin and Morris Panov shot to death, Jason Bourne MIA and on the loose five days before the terrorism summit, the most important international meeting of the century. He shuddered. He abhorred loose ends, but not nearly as much as Roberta Alonzo-Ortiz, the National Security Advisor, and these days she was running the show. "Ballistics? Forensics?"
"Tomorrow morning," Lindros said. "That was as much as I could push them."
"As far as the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies—"
"I've already neutralized them. We have a clear field." The DCI sighed. He appreciated the DDCI's initiative, but he despised being interrupted. "Get back to work," he said gruffly, and cradled the receiver. For a long time afterward, he stared into the wooden bin, listening to the house breathing. It sounded like an old man. Boards creaked, familiar as an old friend's voice. Madeleine must be making herself a cup of hot chocolate, her traditional sleep aid. He heard the neighbor's corgi bark, and for some reason he could not fathom, it seemed a mournful sound, full of sorrow and failed hope. At length, he reached into the bin, picked out a torso in Civil War gray, a new tin soldier to create.
CHAPTER FOUR
"Must've been some accident, by the look of you," Jack Kerry said.
"Not really, just a flat," Bourne replied easily. "But I didn't have a spare, and then I tripped on something—a tree root, I think. I took quite a tumble into the stream." He made a deprecating gesture. "I'm not exactly well coordinated."
"Join the crew," Kerry said. He was a large, rawboned man with a double chin and too much fat around his middle. He had picked Bourne up a mile back. "One time my wife asked me to run the dishwasher, I filled it up with Tide. Jesus, you should've seen the mess!" He laughed good-naturedly.
The night was pitch-dark, no moon or stars. A soft drizzle had begun and Kerry put on the windshield wipers. Bourne shivered a little in his damp clothes. He knew he had to focus, but every time he closed his eyes he saw images of Alex and Mo; he saw blood seeping, bits of skull and brain. His fingers curled, hands tightening into fists.
"So what is it you do, Mr. Little?"
Bourne had given his name as Dan Little when Kerry introduced himself. Kerry, it appeared, was an old-style gentleman who put great store in the niceties of convention.
"I'm an accountant."
"I design nuclear waste facilities, myself. Travel far and wide, yessir." Kerry gave him a sideways glance, light spinning off his glasses. "Hell, you don't look like an accountant, you don't mind me saying."
Bourne forced himself to laugh. "Everyone says that. I played football in college."
"Haven't let yourself go to seed like many ex-athletes," Kerry observed. He patted his rotund abdomen. "Not like me. Except I never was an athlete. I tried once. Never knew which way to run. Got screamed at by the coach. And then I got tackled good." He shook his head. "That was enough for me. I'm a lover, not a fighter." He glanced at Bourne again. "You got a family, Mr. Little?"
Bourne hesitated a moment. "A wife and two children."
"Happy, are ya?"
A wedge of black trees hurried by, a telephone pole leaning into the wind, a shack abandoned, draped with thorny creeper, returned to the wild. Bourne closed his eyes.
"Very happy."
Kerry manhandled the car around a sweeping curve. One thing you could say about him—he was an excellent driver. "Me, I'm divorced. That was a bad one. My wife left me with my three-year-old in tow. That was ten years ago." He frowned. "Or is it eleven?
Anyway, I haven't seen or heard from either her or the boy since." Bourne's eyes snapped open. "You haven't been in touch with your son?"
"It's not that I haven't tried." There was a querulous note to Kerry's voice as he turned defensive. "For a while, I called every week, sent him letters, money, you know, for things he might like, a bike and such. Never heard a word back."
"Why didn't you go to see him?"
Kerry shrugged. "I finally got the message—he didn't want to see me."
"That was your wife's message," Bourne said. "Your son's only a child. He doesn't know what he wants. How can he? He hardly knows you."
Kerry grunted. "Easy for you to say, Mr. Little. You've got a warm hearth, a happy family to go home to every night."
"It's precisely because I have children that I know how precious they are," Bourne said.
"If it was my son, I'd fight tooth and nail to know him and to get him back into my life." They were coming to a more populated area now, and Bourne saw a motel, a strip of closed stores. In the distance, he could see a red flash, then another. There was a roadblock up ahead and, by the look
of it, a major one. He counted eight cars in all, in two ranks of four each, turned at forty-five degrees to the highway in order to afford their occupants the greatest protection while allowing the cars to quickly close ranks if need be. Bourne knew he couldn't allow himself to get anywhere near the roadblock, not, at least, sitting in plain view. He would have to find some other way to get through it. All at once, the neon sign of an all-night convenience store loomed out of the darkness.
"I think this is as far as I'll go."
"You sure, Mr. Little? It's still pretty desolate out here."
"Don't worry about me. I'll just have my wife come and pick me up. We don't live far from here."
"Then I should take you all the way home."
"I'll be fine here. Really."
Kerry pulled over and slowed to a stop just past the convenience store. Bourne got out.
"Thanks for the lift."
"Any time." Kerry smiled. "And, Mr. Little, thanks for the advice. I'll think on what you said."
Bourne watched Kerry drive off, then he turned and walked into the convenience store. The ultra-bright fluorescent lights made his eyes burn. The attendant, a pimply-faced young man with long hair and bloodshot eyes, was smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback book. He looked up briefly as Bourne entered, nodded disinterestedly and went back to his reading. Somewhere a radio was on; someone was singing "Yesterday's Gone," in a world-weary, melancholy voice. She might have been singing it for Bourne. One look at the shelves reminded him that he hadn't eaten since lunch. He grabbed a plastic jar of peanut butter, a box of crackers, some beef jerky, orange juice and water. Protein and vitamins were what he needed. He also purchased a T-shirt, a long-sleeved striped shirt, razor and shaving cream, other items he knew from long experience he would need.
Bourne approached the counter, and the attendant put down the dogeared book he had been reading. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. Bourne remembered reading it just after he returned from Nam, a book as hallucinatory as the war. Fragments of his life came hurtling back—the blood, the death, the rage, the reckless killing, all to blot out the excruciating, never-ending pain of what had happened in the river just outside his house in Phnom Penh. "You've got a warm hearth, a happy family to go home to every night," Kerry had said. If only he knew.
"Anything else?" the pimply-faced young man said.
Bourne blinked, returning to the present. "Do you have an electrical charger for a cell phone?"
"Sorry, bud, all out."
Bourne paid for his purchases in cash, took possession of the brown paper bag and left. Ten minutes later he walked onto the motel grounds. There were few cars. A tractortrailer was parked at one end of the motel, a refrigerated truck, by the look of the compressor squatting on its top. Inside the office a spindly man with the gray face of an undertaker shuffled out from behind a desk in the rear, where he'd been watching an ancient portable black-and-white TV. Bourne checked in using another assumed name, paying for the room in cash. He was left with precisely sixty-seven dollars.
"Goddamn strange night," the spindly man rasped.
"How so?"
The spindly man's eyes lit up. "Don't tell me ya didn't hear about the murders?" Bourne shook his head.
"Not twenty miles away." The spindly man leaned over the counter. His breath smelled unpleasantly from coffee and bile. "Two men— government people—nobody sayin'
nothin' else about 'em, an' y'know what that means around here: hush-hush, deep-throat, cloak-an'-dagger, who the hell knows what they was up to? You turn on CNN when you get to the room, we got cable an' everything." He handed Bourne the key. "Putcha in a room at the other end from Guy—he's the trucker, might have seen his semi when you came in. Guy makes a reg'lar run from Florida to D.C.; he'll be leavin' at five, don't wantcha disturbed, now do we?"
The room was a drab brown, timeworn. Even the smell of an industrial-strength cleaner could not entirely blot out the odor of decay. Bourne turned on the TV, switching channels. He took out the peanut butter and crackers, began to eat.
"There is no doubt that this bold, visionary initiative of the president's has a chance to build bridges toward a more peaceful future," the CNN newsreader was saying. Behind her, a graphic banner in screaming red across the top of the screen proclaimed the terrorism summit with all the subtlety of a London tabloid. "The summit includes, besides the president himself, the president of Russia and the leaders of the major Arab nations. Over the course of the coming week, we'll be checking in with Wolf Blitzer with the president's party and Christiane Amanpour with the Russian and Arab leaders for indepth commentaries. Clearly, the summit has the makings of the news story of the year. Now, for an up-to-the-minute report from Reykjavik, Iceland ..." The scene switched to the front of the Oskjuhlid Hotel, where the terrorism summit would take place in five days' time. An overearnest CNN reporter began to conduct an interview with the head of American security, Jamie Hull. Bourne stared at Hull's squarejawed face, his short brush-cut hair, ginger-colored mustache, cold blue eyes, and an alarm went off in his head. Hull was Agency, high up in its Counterterrorist Center. He and Conklin had butted heads more than once. Hull was a clever political animal; he had his nose up the ass of everyone who counted. But he went by the book even when situations dictated he take a more flexible approach. Conklin must have been apoplectic at his being named head of the American security at the summit.
While Bourne was considering this, a news update took over the crawl on the screen. It concerned the deaths of Alexander Conklin and Dr. Morris Panov, both, according to the crawl, high-level government officials. All at once, the scene shifted and a banner reading breaking news flashed on, followed by another, manassas murders, which was superimposed above a government photo of David Webb that took up almost the entire screen. The newsreader began her update on the brutal murders of Alex Conklin and Dr. Morris Panov. "Each was shot once in the head," the newsreader said with all the grim delight of her ilk, "indicating the work of a professional killer. The government's prime suspect is this man, David Webb. Webb may be using an alias, Jason Bourne. According to highly placed government sources, Webb, or Bourne, is delusional and is considered dangerous. If you see this man, do not approach. Call the number listed on your screen...."
Bourne switched off the sound. Christ, the shit had really hit the fan now. No wonder that roadblock up ahead had looked so well organized— it was Agency, not the local cops.
He had better get to work. Brushing crumbs off his lap, he pulled out Conklin's cell phone. It was time to find out who Alex had been talking to when he had been shot. He accessed the auto-redial key, listened to the ring on the other end. A prerecorded message came on. This wasn't a personal number; it was a business. Lincoln Fine Tailors. The thought that Conklin was talking to his tailor when he was shot to death was depressing, indeed. It was no way for a master spy to go out.
He accessed the last incoming call, which was from the previous evening. It was from the DCI. Dead end, Bourne thought. He rose. As he padded to the bathroom, he stripped off his clothes. For a long time he stood under the hot shower spray, his mind deliberately blank as he sluiced the dirt and sweat off his skin. It was good to feel warm again and clean. Now if only he had a fresh set of clothes. All at once his head came up. He wiped water out of his eyes, his heart beating fast, his mind fully engaged again. Conklin's clothes were made by Old World Tailors off M Street; Alex had been going there for years. He even had dinner with the owner, a Russian immigrant, once or twice a year. In something of a frenzy Bourne dried himself off, took up Conklin's phone again and dialed information. After he had gotten Lincoln Fine Tailors' address in Alexandria, he sat on the bed, staring at nothing. He was wondering just what it was Lincoln Fine Tailors did besides cut fabric and sew hems.
Hasan Arsenov appreciated Budapest in ways Khalid Murat could never have. He said as much to Zina Hasiyev as they passed through Immigration.
"Poor Murat," she said. "A brave soul, a courageous fighter for
independence, but his thinking was strictly nineteenth century." Zina, Arsenov's trusted lieutenant as well as his lover, was small, wiry, as athletic as Arsenov himself. Her hair was long, black as night, swirling around her head like a corona. Her wide mouth and dark, lustrous eyes also contributed to her wild, gypsylike appearance, but her mind could be as detached and calculating as a litigator's, and she was stone-cold fearless.
Arsenov grunted in pain as he ducked into the back of the waiting limousine. The assassin's shot had been perfect, striking muscle only, the bullet exiting his thigh as cleanly as it had entered. The wound hurt like hell, but the pain was worth it, Arsenov thought as he settled in beside his lieutenant. No suspicion had fallen on him; even Zina had no idea he had colluded in Murat's assassination. But what choice had he had? Murat had been growing increasingly nervous regarding the consequences of the Shaykh's plan. He hadn't had Arsenov's vision, his monumental sense of social justice. He would have been content merely to win back Chechnya from the Russians, while the rest of the world turned its back in scorn.
Whereas, when the Shaykh had unfurled his bold and daring stratagem, it was, for Arsenov, the moment of revelation. He could vividly see the future the Shaykh was holding out to them like a ripe fruit. Gripped by the flash of supernal illumination, he had looked at Khalid Murat for confirmation, had seen instead the bitter truth. Khalid could not see past the borders of his homeland, could not understand that regaining the homeland was, in a way, secondary. Arsenov realized that the Chechens needed to gain power not only to throw off the yoke of the Russian infidel but to establish their place in the Islamic world, to gain the respect of the other Muslim nations. The Chechens were Sunnis who had embraced the teachings of the Sufi mystics, personified by the zikr, the remembrance of God, the common ritual involving chanted prayer and rhythmic dance that achieved a shared trancelike state during which the eye of God appeared to the assembled. Sunni, being as monolithic as other religions, abhorred, feared and therefore reviled those who deviated even slightly from its strict central doctrine. Mysticism, divine or otherwise, was anathema. Nineteenth-century thinking, in every sense of the phrase, Arsenov thought bitterly.
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