7

Black coffee had a sobering effect on Conklin but nowhere near the effect of David’s confidence in him. The former Jason Bourne respected the talents of his past, most deadly enemy and let him know it. They talked until four o’clock in the morning, refining the blurred outlines of a strategy, basing it on reality but carrying it much further. And as the alcohol diminished, Conklin began to function. He began to give shape to what David had formulated only vaguely. He perceived the basic soundness of Webb’s approach and found the words.

“You’re describing a spreading crisis-situation mounted in the fact of Marie’s abduction, then sending it off the wire with lies. But as you said, it’s got to be set off at high speed, hitting them hard and fast, with no letup.”

“Use the complete truth first,” interrupted Webb, speaking rapidly. “I broke in here threatening to kill you. I made accusations based on everything that’s happened—from McAllister’s scenario to Babcock’s statement that they’d send out an execution team to find me … to that Anglicized voice of dry ice who told me to cease and desist with Medusa or they’d call me insane and put me back in a mental stockade. None of it can be denied. It did happen and I’m threatening to expose everything, including Medusa.”

“Then we spiral off into the big lie,” said Conklin, pouring more coffee. “A breakaway so out of sight that it throws everything and everybody into a corkscrew turn.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll have to think about it. It’s got to be something totally unexpected, something that will unbalance the strategists, whoever they are—because every instinct tells me that somewhere they lost control. If I’m right, one of them will have to make contact.”

“Then get out your notebooks,” insisted David. “Start going back and reach five or six people who are logical contenders.”

“That could take hours, even days,” objected the CIA officer. “The barricades are up and I’d have to get around them. We don’t have the time—you don’t have the time.”

“There has to be time! Start moving.”

“There’s a better way,” countered Alex. “Panov gave it to you.”

“Mo?”

“Yes. The logs at State, the official logs.”

“The logs …?” Webb had momentarily forgotten; Conklin had not. “In what way?”

“It’s where they started to build the new file on you. I’ll reach Internal Security with another version, at least a variation that will call for answers from someone—if I’m right, if it’s gone off the wire. Those logs are only an instrument, they record, they don’t confirm accuracy. But the security personnel responsible for them will send up rockets if they think the system’s been tampered with. They’ll do our work for us.… Still, we need the lie.”

“Alex,” said David, leaning forward in his chair opposite the long, worn couch. “A few moments ago you used the term ‘breakaway’—”

“It simply means a disruption in the scenario, a break in the pattern.”

“I know what it means, but how about using it here literally. Not breakaway, but ‘broke away.’ They’re calling me pathological, a schizophrenic—that means I fantasize, I sometimes tell the truth and sometimes not, and I’m not supposed to be able to tell the difference.”

“It’s what they’re saying,” agreed Conklin. “Some of them may even believe it. So?”

“Why don’t we take this way up, really out of sight? We’ll say that Marie broke away. She reached me and I’m on my way to meet her.”

Alex frowned, then gradually widened his eyes, the creases disappearing. “It’s perfect,” he said quietly. “My God, it’s perfect! The confusion will spread like a brushfire. In any operation this deep only two or three men know all the details. The others are kept in the dark. Jesus, can you imagine? An officially sanctioned kidnapping! A few at the core might actually panic and collide with each other trying to save their asses. Very good, Mr. Bourne.”

Oddly enough, Webb did not resent the remark, he merely accepted it without thinking. “Listen,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’re both exhausted. We know where we’re heading, so let’s get a couple of hours’ sleep and go over everything in the morning. You and I learned years ago the difference between a scratch of sleep and none at all.”

“Are you going back to the hotel?” asked Conklin.

“No way,” replied David, looking down at the pale, drawn face of the CIA man. “Just get me a blanket. I’m staying right here in front of the bar.”

“You also should have learned when not to worry about some things,” said Alex, rising from the couch and limping toward a closet near the small foyer. “If this is going to be my last hurrah—one way or another—I’ll give it my best. It might even sort things out for me.” Conklin turned, having taken a blanket and a pillow from the closet shelf. “I guess you could call it some kind of weird precognition, but do you know what I did last night after work?”

“Sure, I do. Among other clues there’s a broken glass on the floor.”

“No, I mean before that.”

“What?”

“I stopped off at the supermarket and bought a ton of food. Steak, eggs, milk—even that glue they call oatmeal. I mean, I never do that.”

“You were ready for a ton of food. It happens.”

“When it does, I go to a restaurant.”

“What’s your point?”

“You sleep; the couch is big enough. I’m going to eat. I want to think some more. I’m going to cook a steak, maybe some eggs, too.”

“You need sleep.”

“Two, two and a half hours’ll be fine. Then I’ll probably have some of that goddamned oatmeal.”

Alexander Conklin walked down the corridor of the State Department’s fourth floor, his limp lessened through sheer determination, the pain greater because of it. He knew what was happening to him: there was a job facing him that he wanted very much to do well—even brilliantly, if that term had any relevance for him any longer. Alex realized that months of abusing the blood and the body could not be overcome in a matter of hours, but something within him could be summoned. It was a sense of authority, laced with righteous anger. Jesus, the irony! A year ago he had wanted to destroy the man they called Jason Bourne; now it was a sudden, growing obsession to help David Webb—because he had wrongfully tried to kill Jason Bourne. It could place him beyond-salvage, he understood that, but it was right that the risk was his. Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

And look better, he considered. He had forced himself to walk many more blocks than he should have, letting the cold autumn wind in the streets bring a color to his face that had not been there in years. Combined with a clean shave and a pressed pin-striped suit he had not worn in months, he bore little resemblance to the man Webb found last night. The rest was performance, he knew that, too, as he approached the sacrosanct double doors of the State Department’s Chief of Internal Security.

Little time was spent on formalities, even less on informal conversation. At Conklin’s request—read Agency demand—an aide left the room, and he faced the rugged former brigadier general from the Army’s G-2 who now headed State’s Internal Security. Alex intended to take command with his first words.

“I’m not here on an interagency diplomatic mission, General—it is General, isn’t it?”

“I’m still called that, yes.”

“So I don’t give a damn about being diplomatic, do you understand me?”

“I’m beginning not to like you, I understand that.”

That,” said Conklin, “is the least of my concerns. What does concern me, however, is a man named David Webb.”

“What about him?”

Him? The fact that you recognize the name so readily isn’t very reassuring. What’s going on, General?”

“Do you want a megaphone, spook?” said the ex-soldier curtly.

“I want answers, Corporal—that’s what you and this office are to us.”

“Back off, Conklin! When you called me with your so-called emergency and switchboard verification, I did a little verifying myself. That big reputation of yours is a little wobbly these days, and I use the term on good advice. You’re a lush, spook, and no secret’s been made about it. So you’ve got less than a minute to say what you want to say before I throw you out. Take your choice—the elevator or the window.”

Alex had calculated the probability that his drinking would be telegraphed. He stared at the chief of Internal Security and spoke evenly, even sympathetically. “General, I will answer that accusation with one sentence, and if it ever reaches anyone else, I’ll know where it came from and so will the Agency.” Conklin paused, his eyes clear and penetrating. “Our profiles are often what we want them to be for reasons we can’t talk about. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

The State Department man received Alex’s gaze with a reluctantly sympathetic one of his own. “Oh, Christ,” he said softly. “We used to give dishonorables to men we were sending out in Berlin.”

“Often at our suggestion,” agreed Conklin, nodding. “And it’s all we’ll say on the subject.”

“Okay, okay. I was out of line, but I can tell you the profile’s working. I was told by one of your deputy directors that I’d pass out at your breath with you halfway across the room.”

“I don’t even want to know who he is, General, because I might laugh in his face. As it happens, I don’t drink.” Alex had a childhood compulsion to cross his fingers somewhere out of sight, or his legs, or his toes, but no method came to him. “Let’s get back to David Webb,” he added sharply, no quarter in his voice.

“What’s your beef?”

“My beef? My goddamned life, soldier. Something’s going on and I want to know what it is! That son of a bitch broke into my apartment last night and threatened to kill me. He made some pretty wild accusations naming men on your payroll like Harry Babcock and Samuel Teasdale and William Lanier. We checked; they’re in your covert division and still practicing. What the hell did they do? One made it plain you’d send out an execution team after him! What kind of language is that? Another told him to go back to a hospital—he’s been in two hospitals and our combined, very private clinic in Virginia—we all put him there—and he’s got a clean bill! He’s also got some secrets in his head none of us wants out. But that man is ready to explode because of something you idiots did, or let happen, or closed your fucking eyes to! He claims to have proof that you walked back into his life and turned it around, that you set him up and took a hell of a lot more than a pound of flesh!”

What proof?” asked the stunned general.

“He spoke to his wife,” said Conklin in a sudden monotone.

“So?”

“She was taken from their home by two men who sedated her and put her on a private jet. She was flown to the West Coast.”

“You mean she was kidnapped?”

“You’ve got it. And what should make you swallow hard is that she overheard the two of them talking to the pilot, and gathered that the whole dirty business had something to do with the State Department—for reasons unknown—but the name McAllister was mentioned. For your enlightenment he’s one of your undersecretaries from the Far East Section.”

“This is nuts!

“I’ll tell you what’s more than nuts—mine and yours in a crushed salad. She got away during a refueling stop in San Francisco. That’s when she reached Webb back in Maine. He’s on his way to meet her—God knows where—but you’d better have some solid answers, unless you can establish the fact that he’s a lunatic who may have killed his wife—which I hope you can—and that there was no abduction—which I sincerely hope there wasn’t.”

“He’s certifiable!” cried the chief of State’s Internal Security. “I read those logs! I had to—someone else called about this Webb last night. Don’t ask me who, I can’t tell you.”

“What the hell is going on?” demanded Conklin, leaning across the desk, his hands on the edge, as much for support as for effect.

“He’s paranoid, what can I say? He makes things up and believes them!”

“That’s not what the government doctors determined,” said Conklin icily. “I happen to know something about that.”

“I don’t, damn it!”

“You probably never will,” agreed Alex. “But as a surviving member of the Treadstone operation, you reach someone who can say the right words to me and put my mind at ease. Somebody over here has opened up a can of worms we intend to keep a tight lid on.” Conklin took out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen; he wrote down a number, tore off the page and dropped it on the desk. “That’s a sterile phone; a trace would only give you a false address,” he continued, his eyes hard, his voice firm, the slight tremble even ominous. “It’s to be used between three and four this afternoon, no other time. Have someone reach me then. I don’t care who it is or how you do it. Maybe you’ll have to call one of your celebrated policy conferences, but I want answers—we want answers!”

“You could be all wet, you know!”

“I hope I am. But if I’m not, you people over here are going to get strung up—hard—because you’ve crossed over into off-limits territory.”

David was grateful that there were so many things to do, for without them he might plummet into a mental limbo and become paralyzed by the strain of knowing both too much and too little. After Conklin left for Langley, he had returned to the hotel and started his inevitable list. Lists calmed him; they were preliminaries to necessary activity and forced him to concentrate on specific items rather than on the reasons for selecting them. Brooding over the reasons would cripple his mind as severely as a land mine had crippled Conklin’s right foot. He could not think about Alex either—there were too many possibilities and impossibilities. Nor could he phone his once and former enemy. Conklin was thorough; he was the best. The ex-strategist projected each action and its subsequent reaction, and his first determination was that within minutes after he telephoned the State Department’s chief of Internal Security, other telephones would be used, and two specific phones undoubtedly tapped. Both his. In his apartment and at Langley. Therefore, to avoid any interruptions or interceptions he did not intend to return to his office. He would meet David at the airport later, thirty minutes before Webb’s flight to Hong Kong.

“You think you got here without someone following you?” he had said to Webb. “I’m not certain of that. They’re programming you, and when someone punches a keyboard he keeps his eye on the constant number.”

“Will you please speak English? Or Mandarin? I can handle those but not that horseshit.”

“They could have a microphone under your bed. I trust you’re not a closet something-or-other.”

There would be no contact until they met at the lounge at Dulles Airport, which was why David now stood at a cashier’s counter in a luggage store on Wyoming Avenue. He was buying an outsized flight bag to replace his suitcase; he had discarded much of his clothing. Things—precautions—were coming back to him, among them the unwarranted risk of waiting in an airport’s luggage area, and since he wanted the greater anonymity of economy class, a carryon two-suiter might be disallowed. He would buy whatever he needed wherever he was, and that meant he had to have a great deal of money for any number of contingencies. This fact determined his next stop, a bank on Fourteenth Street.

A year ago while the government probers were examining what was left of his memory, Marie had quietly, rapidly withdrawn the funds David had left in Zurich’s Gemeinschaft Bank as well as those he had transferred to Paris as Jason Bourne. She had wired the money to the Cayman Islands, where she knew a Canadian banker, and established an appropriately confidential account. Considering what Washington had done to her husband—the damage to his mind, the physical suffering and near loss of life because men refused to hear his cries for help—she was letting the government off lightly. If David had decided to sue, and in spite of everything, it was not out of the question, any astute attorney would go into court seeking damages upwards of $10 million, not roughly five-plus.

She had speculated aloud about her thoughts regarding legal redress with an extremely nervous deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She did not discuss the missing funds other than to say that with her financial training she was appalled to learn that so little protection had been given the American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. She had delivered this criticism in a shocked if gentle voice, but her eyes were saying something else. The lady was a highly intelligent, highly motivated tiger, and her message got through. So wiser and more cautious men saw the logic of her speculations and let the matter drop. The funds were buried under top-secret, eyes-only contingency appropriations.

Whenever additional money was needed—a trip, a car, the house—Marie or David would call their banker in the Caymans and he would credit the funds by wire to any of five dozen reciprocating banks in Europe, the United States, the Pacific Islands, and the Far East, exclusive of the Philippines.

From a pay phone on Wyoming Avenue, Webb placed a collect call, mildly astonishing his friendly banker by the amount of money he needed immediately, and the funds he wanted available in Hong Kong. The collect call came to less than eight dollars, the money to over half a million dollars.

“I assume that my dear friend, the wise and glorious Marie, approves, David?”

“She told me to call you. She said she can’t be bothered with trifles.”

“How like her! The banks you will use are …”

Webb walked through the thick glass doors of the bank on Fourteenth Street, spent twenty irritating minutes with a vice president who tried too hard to be an instant chum, and walked out with $50,000, forty in $500 bills, the rest a mix.

He then hailed a cab and was driven to an apartment in D.C. North West, where a man he had known in his days as Jason Bourne lived, a man who had done extraordinary work for the State Department’s Treadstone 71. The man was a silver-haired black who had been a taxi driver until one day a passenger left a Hasselblad camera in his car and never put in a claim. That was years ago, and for several years the cabbie had experimented, and had found his true vocation. Quite simply, he was a genius at “alteration”—his specialty being passports and driver’s licenses with photographs and ID cards for those who had come in conflict with the law, in the main with felony arrests. David had not remembered the man, but under Panov’s hypnosis he had said the name—improbably, the name was Cactus—and Mo had brought the photographer to Virginia to help jar a part of Webb’s memory. There had been warmth and concern in the old black man’s eyes on his first visit, and although it was an inconvenience, he had requested permission from Panov to visit David once a week.

“Why, Cactus?”

“He’s troubled, sir. I saw that through the lens a couple of years ago. There’s somethin’ missin’ in him, but for all that he’s a good man. I can talk to him. I like him, sir.”

“Come whenever you like, Cactus, and please cancel that ‘sir’ stuff. Reserve the privilege for me … sir.”

“My, how times change. I call one of my grandchildren a good nigger, he wants to stomp on my head.”

“He should … sir.”

Webb got out of the taxi, asking the driver to wait, but he refused. David left a minimum tip and walked up the overgrown flagstone path to the old house. In some ways it reminded him of the house in Maine, too large, too fragile and too much in need of repair. He and Marie had decided to buy on the beach as soon as a year was up; it was unseemly for a newly appointed associate professor to move into the high-rent district upon arrival. He rang the bell.

The door opened, and Cactus, squinting under a green eye shade, greeted him as casually as if they had seen each other several days ago.

“You got hubcaps on your car, David?”

“No car and no taxi; it wouldn’t stay.”

“Must’a’ heard all those unfounded rumors circulated by the fascist press. Me. I got three machine guns in the windows. Come on in, I’ve missed you. Why didn’t you call this old boy?”

“Your number’s not listed, Cactus.”

“Must’a’ been an oversight.”

They chatted for several minutes in Cactus’s kitchen, long enough for the photographer-specialist to realize Webb was in a hurry. The old man led David into his studio, placed Webb’s three passports under an angled lamp for close inspection and instructed his client to sit in front of an open-lense camera.

“We’ll make the hair light ash, but not as blond as you were after Paris. That ash tone varies with the lighting and we can use the same picture on each of these li’l dears with considerable differences—still retaining the face. Leave the eyebrows alone, I’ll mess with them here.”

“What about the eyes?” asked David.

“No time for those fancy contacts they got you before, but we can handle it. They’re regular glasses with just the right tinted prisms in the right places. You got blue eyes or brown eyes or Spanish-armada black, if you want ’em.”

“Get all three,” said Webb.

“They’re expensive, David, and cash only.”

“I’ve got it on me.”

“Don’t let it get around.”

“Now, the hair. Who?”

“Down the street. An associate of mine who had her own beauty shop until the gendarmes checked the upstairs rooms. She does fine work. Come on, I’ll take you over.”

An hour later Webb ducked out from under a hair dryer in the small well-lighted cubicle and surveyed the results in the large mirror. The beautician-owner of the odd salon, a short black lady with neat gray hair and an appraiser’s eye, stood alongside him.

“It’s you, but it ain’t you,” she said, first nodding her head, then shaking it. “A fine job, I’ve got to say it.”

It was, thought David, looking at himself. His dark hair not only was far, far lighter, but matched the skin tones of his face. Too, the hair itself seemed lighter in texture, a groomed but a much more casual look—windblown, as the advertisements phrased it. The man he was staring at was both himself and someone else who bore a striking resemblance—but not him.

“I agree,” said Webb. “It’s very good. How much?”

“Three hundred dollars,” replied the woman simply. “Of course, that includes five packets of custom-made rinse powder with instructions, and the tightest lips in Washington. The first will hold you for a couple of months, the second for the rest of your life.”

“You’re all heart.” David reached into his pocket for his leather money clip, counted out the bills and gave them to her. “Cactus said you’d call him when we were finished.”

“No need to; he’s got his timing down. He’s in the parlor.”

“The parlor?”

“Oh, I guess it’s a hallway with a settee and a floor lamp, but I do so like to call it a parlor. Sounds nice, don’t it?”

The photo session went swiftly, interrupted by Cactus’s reshaping his eyebrows with a toothbrush and a spray for the three separate shots, and changing shirts and jackets—Cactus had a wardrobe worthy of a costume supply house—and finally wearing two pairs of glasses, tortoiseshell and steel-rimmed, which altered his hazel eyes respectively to blue and brown for two of the passports. The specialist then surgically proceeded to insert the photos in place, and under a large, powerful magnifying glass skillfully stamped out the original State Department perforations with a tool of his own design. When he finished, he handed the three passports to David for his approval.

“Ain’t no customs jockey gonna’ pick on them,” said Cactus confidently.

“They look more authentic than they did before.”

“I cleaned ’em up, which is to say I gave ’em a few creases and some aging.”

“It’s terrific work, old friend—older than I can remember, I know that. What do I owe you?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. It was such a little job and it’s been such a big year what with all the hasslin’ goin’ on—”

“How much, Cactus?”

“What’s comfortable? I don’t figure you’re on Uncle’s payroll.”

“I’m doing very nicely, thanks.”

“Five hundred’s fine.”

“Call me a cab, will you?”

“Takes too long, and that’s if you can get one out here. My grandson’s waiting for you; he’ll drive you wherever you want to go. He’s like me, he don’t ask questions. And you’re in a hurry, David, I can sense that. Come on, I’ll see you to the door.”

“Thanks. I’ll leave the cash here on the counter.”

“Fine.”

Removing the money from his pocket, his back to Cactus, Webb counted out six $500 bills and left them in the darkest area of the studio counter. At $1,000 apiece the passports were a gift, but to leave more might offend his old friend.

He returned to the hotel, getting out of the car several blocks away in the middle of a busy intersection so that Cactus’s grandson could not be compromised where an address was concerned. The young man, as it happened, was a senior at American University, and although he obviously adored his grandfather, he was just as obviously apprehensive about being any part of the old man’s endeavors.

“I’ll get out here,” said David in the stalled traffic.

“Thanks,” responded the young black, his voice pleasantly calm, his intelligent eyes showing relief. “I appreciate it.”

Webb looked at him. “Why did you do it? I mean, for someone who’s going to be a lawyer, I’d think your antenna would work overtime around Cactus.”

“It does, constantly. But he’s a great old guy who’s done a lot for me. Also, he said something to me. He said it would be a privilege for me to meet you, that maybe years from now he’d tell me who the stranger was in my car.”

“I hope I can come back a lot sooner and tell you myself. I’m no privilege, but there’s a story to tell that could end up in the law books. Good-bye.”

Back in his hotel room, David faced a final list that needed no items written out; he knew them. He had to select the few clothes he would take in the large flight bag and get rid of the rest of his possessions, including the two weapons he had brought down from Maine in his outrage. It was one thing to dismantle and wrap in foil the parts of a gun to be placed in a suitcase, and quite another to carry weapons through a security gate. They would be picked up; he would be picked up. He had to wipe them clean, destroy the firing pins and trigger housings and drop them into a sewer. He would buy a weapon in Hong Kong; it was not a difficult purchase.

There was a last thing he had to do, and it was difficult and painful. He had to force himself to sit down and rethink everything that had been said by Edward McAllister that early evening in Maine—everything they all had said, in particular Marie’s words. Something was buried somewhere in that highly charged hour of revelation and confrontation, and David knew he had missed it—was missing it.

He looked at his watch. It was 3:37; the day was passing quickly, nervously. He had to hold on! Oh, God, Marie! Where are you?

Conklin put down his glass of flat ginger ale on the scratched, soiled bar of the seedy establishment on Ninth Street. He was a regular patron for the simple reason that no one in his professional circle—and what was left of his social one—would ever walk through the filthy glass doors. There was a certain freedom in that knowledge, and the other patrons accepted him, the “gimp” who always took off his tie the moment he entered, limping his way to a stool by the pinball machine at the end of the bar. And whenever he did, the rocks-glass filled with bourbon was waiting for him. Also, the owner-bartender had no objections to Alex receiving calls at the still-standing antiquated booth against the wall. It was his “sterile phone,” and it was ringing now.

Conklin trudged across the floor, entered the old booth, and closed the door. He picked up the phone. “Yes?” he said.

“Is this Treadstone?” asked an odd-sounding male voice.

“I was there. Were you?”

“No, I wasn’t, but I’m cleared for the file, for the whole mess.”

The voice! thought Alex. How had Webb described it? Anglicized? Mid-Atlantic, refined, certainly not ordinary. It was the same man. The gnomes had been working; they had made progress. Someone was afraid.

“Then I’m sure your memory corresponds with everything I’ve written down because I was there and I have written it down—written it all down. Facts, names, events, substantiations, backups … everything, including the story Webb told me last night.”

“Then I can assume that if anything ugly happened, your voluminous reportage will find its way to a Senate subcommittee or a pack of congressional watchdogs. Am I right?”

“I’m glad we understand each other.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said the man condescendingly.

“If anything ugly happened, I wouldn’t care, would I?”

“You’re about to retire. You drink a great deal.”

“I didn’t always. There’s usually a reason for both of those things for a man of my age and competence. Could they be admittedly tied into a certain file?”

“Forget it. Let’s talk.”

“Not before you say something a little closer. Treadstone was bandied about here and there; it’s not that substantive.”

“All right. Medusa.”

“Stronger,” said Alex. “But not strong enough.”

“Very well. The creation of Jason Bourne. The Monk.”

“Warmer.”

“Missing funds—unaccounted for and never recovered—estimated to be around five million dollars. Zurich, Paris, and points west.”

“There were rumors. I need a capstone.”

“I’ll give it to you. The execution of Jason Bourne. The date was May twenty-third in Tam Quan … and the same day in New York years later. On Seventy-first Street. Treadstone Seventy-one.”

Conklin closed his eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the hollowness in his throat. “All right,” he said quietly. “You’re in the circle.”

“I can’t give you my name.”

“What are you going to give me?”

“Two words: Back off.”

“You think I’ll accept that?”

“You have to,” said the voice, his words precise. “Bourne is needed where he’s going.”

Bourne?” Alex stared at the phone.

“Yes, Jason Bourne. He can’t be recruited in any normal way, we both know that.”

“So you steal his wife from him? Goddamned animals!

“She won’t be harmed.”

“You can’t guarantee that! You don’t have the controls. You’ve got to be using second and third parties right now, and if I know my business—and I do—they’re probably paid blinds so you can’t be traced; you don’t even know who they are.… My God, you wouldn’t have called me if you did! If you could reach them and get the verifications you want, you wouldn’t be talking to me!”

The cultured voice paused. “Then we both lied, didn’t we, Mr. Conklin? There was no escape on the woman’s part, no call to Webb. Nothing. You went fishing, and so did I, and we both came up with nothing.”

“You’re a barracuda, Mr. No-name.”

“You’ve been where I am, Mr. Conklin. Right down to David Webb.… Now, what can you tell me?”

Alex again felt the hollowness in his throat, now joined with a sharp pain in his chest. “You’ve lost them, haven’t you?” he whispered. “You’ve lost her.”

“Forty-eight hours isn’t permanent,” said the voice guardedly.

“But you’ve been trying like hell to make contact!” accused Conklin. “You’ve called in your conduits, the people who hired the blinds, and suddenly they’re not there—you can’t find them. Jesus, you have lost control! It did go off the wire! Someone walked in on your strategy and you have no idea who it is. He played your scenario and took it away from you!”

“Our safeguards are spread out,” objected the man without the conviction he had displayed during the past moments. “The best men in the field are working every district.”

“Including McAllister? In Kowloon? Hong Kong?”

“You know that?”

“I know.”

“McAllister’s a damn fool, but he’s good at what he does. And, yes, he’s there. We’re not panicked. We’ll recover.”

“Recover what?” asked Alex, filled with anger. “The merchandise? Your strategy’s aborted! Someone else is in charge. Why would he give you back the merchandise? You’ve killed Webb’s wife, Mr. No-name! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“We just wanted to get him over there,” replied the voice defensively. “Explain things, show him. We need him.” Then the man resumed his calm delivery. “And for all we know, everything’s still on the wire. Communications are notoriously bad in that part of the world.”

“The ex-culpa for everything in this business.”

“In most businesses, Mr. Conklin.… How do you read it? Now I’m the one who’s asking—very sincerely. You have a certain reputation.”

Had, No-name.”

“Reputations can’t be taken away or contradicted, only added to, positively or negatively, of course.”

“You’re a fount of unwarranted information, you know that?”

“I’m also right. It’s said you were one of the best. How do you read it?”

Alex shook his head in the booth; the air was close, the noise outside his “sterile” phone growing louder in the seedy bar on Ninth Street. “What I said before. Someone found out what you people were planning—mounting for Webb—and decided to take over.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“Because whoever it is wants Jason Bourne more than you do,” Alex said and hung up.

It was 6:28 when Conklin walked into the lounge at Dulles Airport. He had waited in a taxi down the street from Webb’s hotel and had followed David, giving the driver precise instructions. He had been right, but there was no point in burdening Webb with the knowledge. Two gray Plymouths had picked up David’s cab and alternately exchanged positions during the surveillance. So be it. One Alexander Conklin might be hanged and then again, he might not. People at State were behaving stupidly, he had thought as he wrote down the license numbers. He spotted Webb in a darkened back booth.

“It is you, isn’t it?” said Alex, dragging his dead foot into the banquette. “Do blonds really have more fun?”

“It worked in Paris. What did you find?”

“I found slugs under rocks who can’t find their way up out of the ground. But then they wouldn’t know what to do with the sunlight, would they?”

“Sunlight’s illuminating; you’re not. Cut the crap, Alex. I have to get to the gate in a few minutes.”

“In short words, they worked out a strategy to get you over to Kowloon. It was based on a previous experience—”

“You can skip that,” said David. “Why?”

“The man said they needed you. Not you—Webb, they needed Bourne.”

“Because they say Bourne’s already there. I told you what McAllister said. Did he go into it?”

“No, he wasn’t going to give me that much, but maybe I can use it to press them. However, he told me something else, David, and you have to know it. They can’t find their conduits, so they don’t know who the blinds are or what’s happening. They think it’s temporary, but they’ve lost Marie. Somebody else wants you out there and he’s taken over.”

Webb brought his hand to his forehead, his eyes closed, and suddenly, in silence, the tears fell down his cheeks. “I’m back, Alex. Back into so much I can’t remember. I love her so, I need her so!”

“Cut it out!” ordered Conklin. “You made it clear to me last night that I still had a mind, if not much of a body. You have both. Make them sweat!

How?”

“Be what they want you to be—be the chameleon! Be Jason Bourne.”

“It’s been so long.…”

“You can still do it. Play the scenario they’ve given you.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?”

Over the loudspeakers came the last call for Flight 26 to Hong Kong.

The gray-haired Havilland replaced the phone in its cradle, leaned back in his chair and looked across the room at McAllister. The undersecretary of State was standing next to a huge revolving globe of the world that was perched on an ornamental tripod in front of a bookcase. His index finger was on the southernmost part of China, but his eyes were on the ambassador.

“It’s done,” said the diplomat. “He’s on the plane to Kowloon.”

“It’s God-awful,” replied McAllister.

“I’m sure it appears that way to you, but before you render judgment, weigh the advantages. We’re free now. We are no longer responsible for the events that take place. They are being manipulated by an unknown party.”

“Which is us! I repeat, it’s God-awful!”

“Has your God considered the consequences if we fail?”

“We’re given free will. Only our ethics restrict us.”

“A banality, Mr. Undersecretary. There’s the greater good.”

“There’s also a human being, a man we’re manipulating, driving him back into his nightmares. Do we have that right?”

“We have no choice. He can do what no one else can do—if we give him a reason to do it.”

McAllister spun the globe; it whirled around as he walked toward the desk. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but I will,” he said, standing in front of Raymond Havilland. “I think you’re the most immoral man I’ve ever met.”

“Appearances, Mr. Undersecretary. I have one saving grace which supersedes all the sins I have committed. I will go to any lengths, indulge in all venalities, to stop this planet from blowing itself up. And that includes the life of one David Webb—known where I want him as Jason Bourne.”