The silence lasted precisely five seconds, during which time eyes roamed other eyes, several throats were cleared, and no one moved in his chair. It was as if a decision were being reached without discussion: evasion was to be avoided. Congressman Efrem Walters, out of the hills of Tennessee by way of the Yale Law Review, was not to be dismissed with facile circumlocution that dealt with the esoterica of clandestine manipulations. Bullshit was out.
David Abbott put his pipe down on the table, the quiet clatter his overture. “The less public exposure a man like Cain receives the better it is for everyone.”
“That’s no answer,” said Walters. “But I assume it’s the beginning of one.”
“It is. He’s a professional assassin—that is, a trained expert in wide-ranging methods of taking life. That expertise is for sale, neither politics nor personal motivation any concern to him whatsoever. He’s in business solely to make a profit—and his profits escalate in direct ratio to his reputation.”
The congressman nodded. “So by keeping as tight a lid as you can on that reputation you’re holding back free advertising.”
“Exactly. There are a lot of maniacs in this world with too many real or imagined enemies who might easily gravitate to Cain if they knew of him. Unfortunately, more than we care to think about already have; to date thirty-eight killings can be directly attributed to Cain, and some twelve to fifteen are probables.”
“That’s his list of ‘accomplishments’?”
“Yes. And we’re losing the battle. With each new killing his reputation spreads.”
“He was dormant for a while,” said Knowlton of the CIA. “For a number of months recently we thought he might have been taken himself. There were several probables in which the killers themselves were eliminated; we thought he might have been one of them.”
“Such as?” asked Walters.
“A banker in Madrid who tunneled bribes for the Europolitan Corporation for government purchases in Africa. He was shot from a speeding car on the Paseo de la Castellana. A chauffeur-bodyguard gunned down both driver and killer; for a time we believed the killer was Cain.”
“I remember the incident. Who might have paid for it?”
“Any number of companies,” answered Gillette, “who wanted to sell gold-plated cars and indoor plumbing to instant dictators.”
“What else? Who else?”
“Sheik Mustafa Kalig in Oman,” said Colonel Manning.
“He was reported killed in an abortive coup.”
“Not so,” continued the officer. “There was no attempted coup; G-Two informants confirmed that. Kalig was unpopular, but the other sheiks aren’t fools. The coup story was a cover for an assassination that could tempt other professional killers. Three troublesome nonentities from the Officer Corps were executed to lend credence to the lie. For a while, we thought one of them was Cain; the timing corresponds to Cain’s dormancy.”
“Who would pay Cain for assassinating Kalig?”
“We asked ourselves that over and over again,” said Manning. “The only possible answer came from a source who claimed to know, but there was no way to verify it. He said Cain did it to prove it could be done. By him. Oil sheiks travel with the tightest security in the world.”
“There are several dozen other incidents,” added Knowlton. “Probables that fall into the same pattern where highly protected figures were killed, and sources came forward to implicate Cain.”
“I see.” The congressman picked up the summary page for Zurich. “But from what I gather you don’t know who he is.”
“No two descriptions have been alike,” interjected Abbott. “Cain’s apparently a virtuoso at disguise.”
“Yet people have seen him, talked to him. Your sources, the informants, this man in Zurich; none of them may come out in the open and testify, but surely you’ve interrogated them. You’ve got to have come up with a composite, with something.”
“We’ve come up with a great deal,” replied Abbott, “but a consistent description isn’t part of it. For openers, Cain never lets himself be seen in daylight. He holds meetings at night, in dark rooms or alleyways. If he’s ever met more than one person at a time—as Cain—we don’t know about it. We’ve been told he never stands, he’s always seated—in a dimly lit restaurant, or a corner chair, or parked car. Sometimes he wears heavy glasses, sometimes none at all; at one rendezvous he may have dark hair, on another white or red or covered by a hat.”
“Language?”
“We’re closer here,” said the CIA director, anxious to put the Company’s research on the table. “Fluent English and French, and several Oriental dialects.”
“Dialects? What dialects? Doesn’t a language come first?”
“Of course. It’s root-Vietnamese.”
“Viet—” Walters leaned forward. “Why do I get the idea that I’m coming to something you’d rather not tell me?”
“Because you’re probably quite astute at cross-examination, counselor.” Abbott struck a match and lit his pipe.
“Passably alert,” agreed the congressman. “Now, what is it?”
“Cain,” said Gillette, his eyes briefly, oddly, on David Abbott. “We know where he came from.”
“Where?”
“Out of Southeast Asia,” answered Manning, as if sustaining the pain of a knife wound. “As far as we can gather, he mastered the fringe dialects so to be understood in the hill country along the Cambodian and Laos border routes, as well as in rural North Vietnam. We accept the data; it fits.”
“With what?”
“Operation Medusa.” The colonel reached for a large, thick manila envelope on his left. He opened it and removed a single folder from among several inside; he placed it in front of him. “That’s the Cain file,” he said, nodding at the open envelope. “This is the Medusa material, the aspects of it that might in any way be relevant to Cain.”
The Tennessean leaned back in his chair, the trace of a sardonic smile creasing his lips. “You know, gentlemen, you slay me with your pithy titles. Incidentally, that’s a beaut; it’s very sinister, very ominous. I think you fellows take a course in this kind of thing. Go on, Colonel. What’s this Medusa?”
Manning glanced briefly at David Abbott, then spoke. “It was a clandestine outgrowth of the search-and-destroy concept, designed to function behind enemy lines during the Vietnam war. In the late sixties and early seventies, units of American, French, British, Australian and native volunteers were formed into teams to operate in territories occupied by the North Vietnamese. Their priorities were the disruption of enemy communications and supply lines, the pinpointing of prison camps and, not the least, the assassination of village leaders known to be cooperating with the Communists, as well as the enemy commanders whenever possible.”
“It was a war-within-a-war,” broke in Knowlton. “Unfortunately, racial appearances and languages made participation infinitely more dangerous than, say, the German and Dutch undergrounds, or the French Resistance in World War Two. Therefore, Occidental recruitment was not always as selective as it might have been.”
“There were dozens of these teams,” continued the colonel, “the personnel ranging from old-line navy chiefs who knew the coastlines to French plantation owners whose only hope for reparations lay in an American victory. There were British and Australian drifters who’d lived in Indochina for years, as well as highly motivated American army and civilian intelligence career officers. Also, inevitably, there was a sizable faction of hard-core criminals. In the main, smugglers—men who dealt in running guns, narcotics, gold and diamonds throughout the entire South China Sea area. They were walking encyclopedias when it came to night landings and jungle routes. Many we employed were runaways or fugitives from the States, a number well-educated, all resourceful. We needed their expertise.”
“That’s quite a cross-section of volunteers,” interrupted the congressman. “Old-line navy and army; British and Australian drifters, French colonials, and platoons of thieves. How the hell did you get them to work together?”
“To each according to his greeds,” said Gillette.
“Promises,” amplified the colonel. “Guarantees of rank, promotions, pardons, outright bonuses of cash, and, in a number of cases, opportunities to steal funds from the operation itself. You see, they all had to be a little crazy; we understood that. We trained them secretly, using codes, methods of transport, entrapment and killing—even weapons Command Saigon knew nothing about. As Peter mentioned, the risks were incredible—capture resulting in torture and execution; the price was high and they paid it. Most people would have called them a collection of paranoiacs, but they were geniuses where disruption and assassination were concerned. Especially assassination.”
“What was the price?”
“Operation Medusa sustained over ninety percent casualties. But there’s a catch—among those who didn’t come back were a number who never meant to.”
“From that faction of thieves and fugitives?”
“Yes. Some stole considerable amounts of money from Medusa. We think Cain is one of those men.”
“Why?”
“His modus operandi. He’s used codes, traps, methods of killing and transport that were developed and specialized in the Medusa training.”
“Then for Christ’s sake,” broke in Walters, “you’ve got a direct line to his identity. I don’t care where they’re buried—and I’m damn sure you don’t want them made public—but I assume records were kept.”
“They were, and we’ve extracted them all from the clandestine archives, inclusive of this material here.” The officer tapped the file in front of him. “We’ve studied everything, put rosters under microscopes, fed facts into computers—everything we could think of. We’re no further along than when we began.”
“That’s incredible,” said the congressman. “Or incredibly incompetent.”
“Not really,” protested Manning. “Look at the man; look at what we’ve had to work with. After the war, Cain made his reputation throughout most of East Asia, from as far north as Tokyo down through the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, with side trips to Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos and Calcutta. About two and a half years ago reports began filtering in to our Asian stations and embassies. There was an assassin for hire; his name was Cain. Highly professional, ruthless. These reports started growing with alarming frequency. It seemed that with every killing of note, Cain was involved. Sources would phone embassies in the middle of the night, or stop attachés in the streets, always with the same information. It was Cain, Cain was the one. A murder in Tokyo; a car blown up in Hong Kong; a narcotics caravan ambushed in the Triangle; a banker shot in Calcutta; an ambassador assassinated in Moulmein; a Russian technician or an American businessman killed in the streets of Shanghai itself. Cain was everywhere, his name whispered by dozens of trusted informants in every vital intelligence sector. Yet no one—not one single person in the entire east Pacific area—would come forward to give us an identification. Where were we to begin?”
“But by this time hadn’t you established the fact that he’d been with Medusa?” asked the Tennessean.
“Yes. Firmly.”
“Then with the individual Medusa dossiers, damn it!”
The colonel opened the folder he had removed from the Cain file. “These are the casualty lists. Among the white Occidentals who disappeared from Operation Medusa—and when I say disappeared, I mean vanished without a trace—are the following. Seventy-three Americans, forty-six French, thirty-nine and twenty-four Australians and British respectively, and an estimated fifty white male contacts recruited from neutrals in Hanoi and trained in the field—most of them we never knew. Over two hundred and thirty possibilities; how many are blind alleys? Who’s alive? Who’s dead? Even if we learned the name of every man who actually survived, who is he now? What is he? We’re not even sure of Cain’s nationality. We think he’s American, but there’s no proof.”
“Cain’s one of the side issues contained in our constant pressure on Hanoi to trace MIAs,” explained Knowlton. “We keep recycling these names in with the division lists.”
“And there’s a catch with that, too,” added the army officer. “Hanoi’s counterintelligence forces broke and executed scores of Medusa personnel. They were aware of the operation, and we never ruled out the possibility of infiltration. Hanoi knew the Medusans weren’t combat troops; they wore no uniforms. Accountability was never required.”
Walters held out his hand. “May I?” he said, nodding at the stapled pages.
“Certainly.” The officer gave them to the congressman. “You understand of course that those names still remain classified, as does the Medusa Operation itself.”
“Who made that decision?”
“It’s an unbroken executive order from successive presidents based on the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was supported by the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
“That’s considerable firepower, isn’t it?”
“It was felt to be in the national interest,” said the CIA man.
“In this case, I won’t argue,” agreed Walters. “The specter of such an operation wouldn’t do much for the glory of Old Glory. We don’t train assassins, much less field them.” He flipped through the pages. “And somewhere here just happens to be an assassin we trained and fielded and now can’t find.”
“We believe that, yes,” said the colonel.
“You say he made his reputation in Asia, but moved to Europe. When?”
“About a year ago.”
“Why? Any ideas?”
“The obvious, I’d suggest,” said Peter Knowlton. “He overextended himself. Something went wrong and he felt threatened. He was a white killer among Orientals, at best a dangerous concept; it was time for him to move on. God knows his reputation was made; there’d be no lack of employment in Europe.”
David Abbott cleared his throat. “I’d like to offer another possibility based on something Alfred said a few minutes ago.” The Monk paused and nodded deferentially at Gillette. “He said that we had been forced to concentrate on a ‘toothless sand shark while the hammerhead roamed free,’ I believe that was the phrase, although my sequence may be wrong.”
“Yes,” said the man from NSC. “I was referring to Carlos, of course. It’s not Cain we should be after. It’s Carlos.”
“Of course. Carlos. The most elusive killer in modern history, a man many of us truly believe has been responsible—in one way or another—for the most tragic assassinations of our time. You were quite right, Alfred, and, in a way, I was wrong. We cannot afford to forget Carlos.”
“Thank you,” said Gillette. “I’m glad I made my point.”
“You did. With me, at any rate. But you also made me think. Can you imagine the temptation for a man like Cain, operating in the steamy confines of an area rife with drifters and fugitives and regimes up to their necks in corruption? How he must have envied Carlos; how he must have been jealous of the faster, brighter, more luxurious world of Europe. How often did he say to himself, ‘I’m better than Carlos.’ No matter how cold these fellows are, their egos are immense. I suggest he went to Europe to find that better world … and to dethrone Carlos. The pretender, sir, wants to take the title. He wants to be champion.”
Gillette stared at the Monk. “It’s an interesting theory.”
“And if I follow you,” interjected the congressman from Oversight, “by tracking Cain we may come up with Carlos.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” said the CIA director, annoyed. “Why?”
“Two stallions in a paddock,” answered Walters. “They tangle.”
“A champion does not give up the title willingly.” Abbott reached for his pipe. “He fights viciously to retain it. As the congressman says, we continue to track Cain, but we must also watch for other spoors in the forest. And when and if we find Cain, perhaps we should hold back. Wait for Carlos to come after him.”
“Then take both,” added the military officer.
“Very enlightening,” said Gillette.
The meeting was over, the members in various stages of leaving. David Abbott stood with the Pentagon colonel, who was gathering together the pages of the Medusa folder; he had picked up the casualty sheets, prepared to insert them.
“May I take a look?” asked Abbott. “We don’t have a copy over at Forty.”
“Those were our instructions,” replied the officer, handing the stapled pages to the older man. “I thought they came from you. Only three copies. Here, at the Agency, and over at the Council.”
“They did come from me.” The silent Monk smiled benignly. “Too damn many civilians in my part of town.”
The colonel turned away to answer a question posed by the congressman from Tennessee. David Abbott did not listen; instead his eyes sped rapidly down the columns of names; he was alarmed. A number had been crossed out, accounted for. Accountability was the one thing they could not allow. Ever. Where was it? He was the only man in that room who knew the name, and he could feel the pounding in his chest as he reached the last page. The name was there.
Bourne, Jason C.—Last known station: Tam Quan. What in God’s name had happened?
René Bergeron slammed down the telephone on his desk; his voice only slightly more controlled than his gesture. “We’ve tried every café, every restaurant and bistro she’s ever frequented!”
“There’s not a hotel in Paris that has him registered,” said the gray-haired switchboard operator, seated at a second telephone by a drafting board. “It’s been more than two hours now; she could be dead. If she’s not, she might well wish she were.”
“She can only tell him so much,” mused Bergeron. “Less than we could; she knows nothing of the old men.”
“She knows enough; she’s called Parc Monceau.”
“She’s relayed messages; she’s not certain to whom.”
“She knows why.”
“So does Cain, I can assure you. And he would make a grotesque error with Parc Monceau.” The designer leaned forward, his powerful forearms tensing as he locked his hands together, his eyes on the gray-haired man. “Tell me, again, everything you remember. Why are you so sure he’s Bourne?”
“I don’t know that. I said he was Cain. If you’ve described his methods accurately, he’s the man.”
“Bourne is Cain. We found him through the Medusa records. It’s why you were hired.”
“Then he’s Bourne, but it’s not the name he used. Of course, there were a number of men in Medusa who would not permit their real names to be used. For them, false identities were guaranteed; they had criminal records. He would be one of those men.”
“Why him? Others disappeared. You disappeared.”
“I could say because he was here in Saint-Honoré and that should be enough. But there’s more, much more. I watched him function. I was assigned to a mission he commanded; it was not an experience to be forgotten, nor was he. That man could be—would be—your Cain.”
“Tell me.”
“We parachuted at night into a sector called Tam Quan, our objective to bring out an American named Webb who was being held by the Viet Cong. We didn’t know it, but the odds against survival were monumental. Even the flight from Saigon was horrendous; gale-force winds at a thousand feet, the aircraft vibrating as if it would fall apart. Still, he ordered us to jump.”
“And you did?”
“His gun was pointed at our heads. At each of us as we approached the hatchway. We might survive the elements, not a bullet in our skulls.”
“How many were there of you?”
“Ten.”
“You could have taken him.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“Go on,” said Bergeron, concentrating; immobile at the desk.
“Eight of us regrouped on the ground; two, we assumed, had not survived the jump. It was amazing that I did. I was the oldest and hardly a bull, but I knew the area; it was why I was sent.” The gray-haired man paused, shaking his head at the memory. “Less than an hour later we realized it was a trap. We were running like lizards through the jungle. And during the nights he went out alone through the mortar explosions and the grenades. To kill. Always coming back before dawn to force us closer and closer to the base camp. I thought at the time, sheer suicide.”
“Why did you do it? He had to give you a reason; you were Medusans, not soldiers.”
“He said it was the only way to get out alive, and there was logic to that. We were far behind the lines; we needed the supplies we could find at the base camp—if we could take it. He said we had to take it; we had no choice. If any argued, he’d put a bullet in his head—we knew it. On the third night we took the camp and found the man named Webb more dead than alive, but breathing. We also found the two missing members of our team, very much alive and stunned at what had happened. A white man and a Vietnamese; they’d been paid by the Cong to trap us—trap him, I suspect.”
“Cain?”
“Yes. The Vietnamese saw us first and escaped. Cain shot the white man in the head. I understand he just walked up to him and blew his head off.”
“He got you back? Through the lines?”
“Four of us, yes, and the man named Webb. Five men were killed. It was during that terrible journey back that I thought I understood why the rumors might be true—that he was the highest-paid recruit in Medusa.”
“In what sense?”
“He was the coldest man I ever saw, the most dangerous, and utterly unpredictable. I thought at the time it was a strange war for him; he was a Savonarola, but without religious principle, only his own odd morality which was centered about himself. All men were his enemies—the leaders in particular—and he cared not one whit for either side.” The middle-aged man paused again, his eyes on the drafting board, his mind obviously thousands of miles away and back in time. “Remember, Medusa was filled with diverse and desperate men. Many were paranoid in their hatred of Communists. Kill a Communist and Christ smiled—odd examples of Christian teaching. Others—such as myself—had fortunes stolen from us by the Viet Minh; the only path to restitution was if the Americans won the war. France had abandoned us at Dienbienphu. But there were dozens who saw that fortunes could be made from Medusa. Pouches often contained fifty to seventy-five thousand American dollars. A courier siphoning off half during ten, fifteen runs, could retire in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or set up his own narcotics network in the Triangle. Beyond the exorbitant pay—and frequently the pardoning of past crimes—the opportunities were unlimited. It was in this group that I placed that very strange man. He was a modern-day pirate in the purest sense.”
Bergeron unlocked his hands. “Wait a minute. You used the phrase, ‘a mission he commanded.’ There were military men in Medusa; are you sure he wasn’t an American officer?”
“American, to be sure, but certainly not army.”
“Why?”
“He hated all aspects of the military. His scorn for Command Saigon was in every decision he made; he considered the army fools and incompetents. At one point orders were radioed to us in Tam Quan. He broke off the transmission and told a regimental general to have sex with himself—he would not obey. An army officer would hardly do that.”
“Unless he was about to abandon his profession,” said the designer. “As Paris abandoned you, and you did the best you could, stealing from Medusa, setting up your own hardly patriotic activities—wherever you could.”
“My country betrayed me before I betrayed her, René.”
“Back to Cain. You say Bourne was not the name he used. What was it?”
“I don’t recall. As I said, for many, surnames were not relevant. He was simply ‘Delta’ to me.”
“Mekong?”
“No, the alphabet, I think.”
“ ‘Alpha, Bravo, Charlie … Delta,’ ” said Bergeron pensively in English. “But in many operations the code word ‘Charlie’ was replaced by ‘Cain’ because ‘Charlie’ had become synonymous with the Cong. ‘Charlie’ became ‘Cain.’ ”
“Quite true. So Bourne dropped back a letter and assumed ‘Cain.’ He could have chosen ‘Echo’ or ‘Foxtrot’ or ‘Zulu.’ Twenty-odd others. What’s the difference? What’s your point?”
“He chose Cain deliberately. It was symbolic. He wanted it clear from the beginning.”
“Wanted what clear?”
“That Cain would replace Carlos. Think. ‘Carlos’ is Spanish for Charles—Charlie. The code word ‘Cain’ was substituted for ‘Charlie’—Carlos. It was his intention from the start. Cain would replace Carlos. And he wanted Carlos to know it.”
“Does Carlos?”
“Of course. Word goes out in Amsterdam and Berlin, Geneva and Lisbon, London and right here in Paris. Cain is available; contracts can be made, his price lower than Carlos’ fee. He erodes! He constantly erodes Carlos’ stature.”
“Two matadors in the same ring. There can only be one.”
“It will be Carlos. We’ve trapped the puffed-up sparrow. He’s somewhere within two hours of Saint-Honoré.”
“But where?”
“No matter. We’ll find him. After all, he found us. He’ll come back; his ego will demand it. And then the eagle will sweep down and catch the sparrow. Carlos will kill him.”
The old man adjusted his single crutch under his left arm, parted the black drape and stepped into the confessional booth. He was not well; the pallor of death was on his face, and he was glad the figure in the priest’s habit beyond the transparent curtain could not see him clearly. The assassin might not give him further work if he looked too worn to carry it out; he needed work now. There were only weeks remaining and he had responsibilities. He spoke.
“Angelus Domini.”
“Angelus Domini, child of God,” came the whisper. “Are your days comfortable?”
“They draw to an end, but they are made comfortable.”
“Yes. I think this will be your last job for me. It is of such importance, however, that your fee will be five times the usual. I hope it will be of help to you.”
“Thank you, Carlos. You know, then.”
“I know. This is what you must do for it, and the information must leave this world with you. There can be no room for error.”
“I have always been accurate. I will go to my death being accurate now.”
“Die in peace, old friend. It’s easier.… You will go to the Vietnamese Embassy and ask for an attaché named Phan Loc. When you are alone, say the following words to him: ‘Late March 1968 Medusa, the Tam Quan sector. Cain was there. Another also.’ Have you got that?”
“ ‘Late March 1968 Medusa, the Tam Quan sector. Cain was there. Another also.’ ”
“He’ll tell you when to return. It will be in a matter of hours.”