The call had come at five o’clock in the afternoon and Bourne was ready for it. No names were exchanged.
“It is arranged,” said the caller. “We are to be at the border shortly before twenty-one hundred hours, when the guard changes shifts. Your Shenzen visa will be scrutinized and rubber stamps will fly, but none will touch it. Once inside you are on your own, but you did not come through Macao.”
“What about getting back out? If what you told me is true and things go right, there’ll be someone with me.”
“It will not be me. I will see you over and to the location. After that, I leave you.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It is not so difficult as getting in, unless you are searched and contraband is found.”
“There won’t be any.”
“Then I would suggest drunkenness. It is not uncommon. There is an airfield outside of Shenzen used by special—”
“I know it.”
“You were on the wrong airplane, perhaps, that too is not uncommon. The schedules are very bad in China.”
“How much for tonight?”
“Four thousand, Hong Kong, and a new watch.”
“Agreed.”
Some ten miles north of the village of Gongbei the hills rise, soon becoming a minor range of densely forested small mountains. Jason and his former adversary from the alley in Macao walked along the dirt road. The Chinese stopped and looked up at the hills above.
“Another five or six kilometers and we will reach a field. We will cross it and head up into the second level of woods. We must be careful.”
“You’re sure they’ll be there?”
“I carried the message. If there is a campfire, they will be there.”
“What was the message?”
“A conference was demanded.”
“Why across the border?”
“It could only be across the border. That, too, was part of the message.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“I am only the messenger. Things are not in balance.”
“You said that last night. Can’t you explain what you mean?”
“I cannot explain it to myself.”
“Could it be because the conference had to take place over here? In China?”
“That is part of it, certainly.”
“There’s more?”
“Wen ti,” said the guide. “Questions that arise from feelings.”
“I think I understand.” And Jason did. He had the same questions, the same feelings, when it had become clear to him that the assassin who called himself Bourne was riding in an official vehicle of the People’s Republic.
“You were too generous with the guard. The watch was too expensive.”
“I may need him.”
“He may not be in the same post.”
“I’ll find him.”
“He’ll sell the watch.”
“Good. I’ll bring him another.”
Crouching, they ran through the tall grass of the field one section at a time, Bourne following the guide, his eyes constantly roving over their flanks and up ahead, finding shadows in the darkness—and yet not total darkness. Fast, low-flying clouds obscured the moon, filtering the light, but every now and then shafts streamed down for brief moments illuminating the landscape. They reached a rising stretch of tall trees and began making their way up. The Chinese stopped and turned, both hands raised.
“What is it?” whispered Jason.
“We must go slowly, make no noise.”
“Patrols?”
The guide shrugged. “I do not know. There is no harmony.”
They crawled up through the tangled forest, stopping at every screech of a disturbed bird and the subsequent flutter of wings, letting the moments pass. The hum of the woods was pervasive; the crickets clicked their incessant symphony, a lone owl hooted, to be answered by another, and small ferretlike creatures scampered through the underbrush. Bourne and his guide came to the end of the tall trees; there was a second sloping field of high grass in front of them, and in the distance were the jagged dark outlines of another climbing forest.
There was also something else. A glow at the top of the next hill, at the summit of the woods. It was a campfire, the campfire! Bourne had to hold himself in check, stop himself from getting up and racing across the field and plunging into the woods, scrambling up to the fire. Patience was everything now, and he was in the dark environs he knew so well; vague memories told him to trust himself—told him that he was the best there was Patience. He would get across the field and silently make his way to the top of the forest; he would find a spot in the woods with a clear view of the fire, of the meeting ground. He would wait, and watch; he would know when to make his move. He had done it so often before—the specifics eluded him, but not the pattern. A man would leave, and like a cat stalking silently through the forest he would follow that man until the moment came. Again, he would know that moment, and the man would be his.
Marie, I won’t fail us this time. I can move with a kind of terrible purity now—that sounds crazy, I know, but then it’s true.… I can hate with purity—that’s where I came from, I think. Three bleeding bodies floating into a riverbank taught me to hate. A bloody hand print on a door in Maine taught me to reinforce that hate, and never to let it happen again. I don’t often disagree with you, my love, but you were wrong in Geneva, wrong in Paris. I am a killer.
“What is wrong with you?” whispered the guide, his head close to Jason’s. “You do not follow my signal!”
“I’m sorry. I was thinking.”
“So am I, peng you! For our lives!”
“You don’t have to worry, you can leave now. I see the fire up there on the hill.” Bourne pulled money from his pocket. “I’d rather go alone. One man has less chance of being spotted than two.”
“Suppose there are other men—patrols? You bested me in Macao, but I am not unworthy in this regard.”
“If there are such men, I intend to find one.”
“In the name of Jesus, why?”
“I want a gun. I couldn’t risk bringing one across the border.”
“Aiya!”
Jason handed the guide the money. “It’s all there. Nine thousand five hundred. You want to go back in the woods and count it? I’ve got a small flashlight.”
“One does not question the man who has bested him. Dignity would not permit such impropriety.”
“Your words are terrific, but don’t buy a diamond in Amsterdam. Go on, get out of here. It’s my territory.”
“And this is my gun,” said the guide, taking a weapon from his belt and handing it to Bourne as he took the money. “Use it if you must. The magazine is full—nine shells. There is no registry, no trace. The Frenchman taught me.”
“You took this across the border?”
“You brought the watch, I did not. I might have dropped it into a garbage bag but then I saw the guard’s face. I will not need it now.”
“Thanks. But I should tell you, if you’ve lied to me, I’ll find you. Count on it.”
“Then the lies would not be mine and the money would be returned.”
“You’re too much.”
“You bested me. I must be honorable in all things.”
Bourne crawled slowly, ever so slowly, across the expanse of tall, starched grass filled with nettles, pulling the needles from his neck and forehead, grateful for the nylon jacket that repelled them. He instinctively knew something his guide did not know, why he did not want the Chinese to come with him. A field with high grass was the most logical place to have patrols; the reeds moved when hidden intruders crawled through them. Therefore one had to observe the swaying grass from the ground and go forward with the prevailing breezes and the sudden mountain winds.
He saw the start of the woods, trees rising at the edge of the grass. He began to raise himself to a crouching position, then suddenly, swiftly, lowered his body and remained motionless. Up ahead to his right, a man stood on the border of the field, a rifle in his hands, watching the grass in the intermittent moonlight, looking for a pattern of reeds that bent against the breezes. A gust of wind swirled down from the mountains. Bourne moved with it, coming to within ten feet of the guard. Half a foot by half a foot he crawled to the edge of the field; he was now parallel with the man whose concentration was focused in front of him, not on his flanks. Jason inched up so he could see through the reeds. The guard looked to his left. Now!
Bourne sprang out of the grass and, rushing forward, lunged at the man. In panic, the guard instinctively swung the butt of the rifle to ward off the sudden attack. Jason grabbed the barrel, twisting it over the man’s head, and crashed it down on the exposed skull as he rammed his knee into the guard’s rib cage. The patrol collapsed. Bourne quickly dragged him into the high grass, out of sight. With as few movements as possible, Jason removed the guard’s jacket and ripped the shirt from his back, tearing the cloth into strips. Moments later the man was bound in such a way that with every move he tightened the improvised straps. His mouth was gagged, a torn sleeve wrapped around his head holding the gag in place.
Normally, as in previous times—Bourne instinctively knew it had been the normal course of similar events—he would have lost no time racing out of the field and starting up through the woods toward the fire. Instead, he studied the unconscious figure of the Oriental below; something disturbed him—something not in harmony. For openers, he had expected the guard would be in the uniform of the Chinese army, for he all too vividly recalled the sight of the government vehicle in Shenzen and knew who was inside. But it was not simply the absence of a uniform, it was the clothes this man wore. They were cheap and filthy, rancid with the smell of grease-laden food. He reached down and twisted the man’s face, opening his mouth; there were few teeth, black with decay. What kind of guard was this, what kind of patrol? He was a thug—no doubt experienced—a brute criminal, contracted in the skid rows of the Orient where life was cheap and generally meaningless. Yet the men at this “conference” dealt in tens of thousands of dollars. The price they paid for a life was very high. Something was not in balance.
Bourne grabbed the rifle and crawled out of the grass. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the murmurs of the forest before him, he got to his feet and raced into the woods. He climbed swiftly, silently, stopping as before with every screech of a bird, every flutter of wings, each abrupt cessation of the cricket symphony. He did not crawl now, he crept on bent legs, holding the barrel of the rifle, a club if the need arose. There could be no gunshots unless his life depended on them, no warning to his quarry. The trap was closing, it was simply a matter of patience now, patience and the final stalk when the jaws of the trap would snap shut. He reached the top of the forest, gliding noiselessly behind a boulder on the edge of the campsite. Silently he lowered the rifle to the ground, withdrew from his belt the gun that the guide had given him and peered around the huge rock.
What he had expected to find below in the field he now saw. A soldier, standing erect in his uniform, a sidearm strapped to his waist, was roughly twenty feet to the left of the fire. It was as if he wanted to be seen but not identified. Out of balance. The man looked at his watch; the waiting had begun.
It lasted the better part of an hour. The soldier had smoked five cigarettes; Jason had remained still, barely breathing. And then it happened, slowly, subtly, no heralding trumpets, an entrance devoid of drama. A second figure appeared; he walked casually out of the shadows, parting the final branches of the forest as he came into view. And, without warning, bolts of lightning streaked down from the night sky, burning, searing into David Webb’s head, numbing the mind of Jason Bourne.
For as the man came into the light of the fire, Bourne gasped, gripping the barrel of the gun to keep from screaming—or from killing. He was looking at a ghost of himself, a haunting apparition from years ago come back to stalk him, no matter who was the hunter now. The face was at once his face yet not his face—perhaps the face as it might have been before the surgeons altered it for Jason Bourne. Like the lean, taut body, the face was younger—younger than the myth he was imitating—and in that youth was strength, the strength of a Delta from Medusa. It was incredible. Even the guarded, catlike walk, the long arms loose at the sides that were so obviously proficient in the deadly arts. It was Delta, the Delta he had been told about, the Delta who had become Cain and finally Jason Bourne. He was looking at himself but not himself, yet withal a killer. An assassin.
A crack in the distance intruded upon the sounds of the mountain forest. The assassin stopped, then spun away from the fire and dove to his right as the soldier dropped to the ground. A deafening, echoing, staccato burst of gunfire erupted from the woods; the killer rolled over and over on the campsite grass, bullets ripping up the earth as he reached the darkness of the trees. The Chinese soldier was on one knee, firing wildly in the assassin’s direction.
Then the ear-shattering battle escalated, not from one level to the next but in three separate stages. The explosions were immense. A first grenade destroyed the campsite, followed by a second, uprooting trees, the dry, windblown branches catching fire, and finally a third, hurled high in the air, detonating with enormous force in the area of the woods from which the machine gun had been triggered. Suddenly flames were everywhere, and Bourne shielded his eyes, moving around the boulder, weapon in hand. A trap had been set for the killer and he had walked into it! The Chinese soldier was dead, his gun blown away, as well as most of his body. A figure suddenly raced from the left into the inferno that had been the campsite, then whipped around and ran through the flames, turning twice and, seeing Jason, firing at him. The assassin had doubled back in the woods, hoping to trap and kill those who would kill him. Spinning, Bourne leaped first to his right, then to his left, then fell to the ground, his eyes on the running man. He got to his feet and sprang forward. He could not let him get away! He raced through the raging fires; the figure ahead of him was weaving through the trees. It was the killer! The impostor who claimed to be the lethal myth that had enraged Asia, using that myth for his own purposes, destroying the original and the wife that man loved. Bourne ran as he had never run before, dodging trees and leaping over the underbrush with an agility that denied the years between Medusa and the present. He was back in Medusa! He was Medusa! And with every ten yards he closed the gap by five. He knew the forests, and every forest was a jungle and every jungle was his friend. He had survived in the jungles; without thinking—–only feeling—he knew their curvatures, their vines, the sudden pits and the abrupt ravines. He was gaining, gaining! And then he was there, the killer only feet ahead of him!
With what seemed like the last breath in his body, Jason lunged—Bourne against Bourne! His hands were the claws of a mountain cat as he gripped the shoulders of the racing figure in front of him, his fingers digging into the hard flesh and bone as he whipped the killer back, his heels dug into the earth, his right knee crashing up into the man’s spine. His rage was such that he consciously had to remind himself not to kill. Stay alive! You are my freedom, our freedom!
The assassin screamed as the true Jason Bourne hammerlocked his neck, wrenching the head to the right and forcing the pretender down. Both fell to the ground, Bourne’s forearm jammed across the man’s throat, his left hand clenched, repeatedly pounding the killer’s lower abdomen, forcing the air out of the weakening body.
The face? The face? Where was the face that belonged to years ago? To an apparition that wanted to take him back into a hell that memory had blocked out. Where was the face? This was not it!
“Delta!” screamed the man beneath him.
“What did you call me?” shouted Bourne.
“Delta!” shrieked the writhing figure. “Cain is for Carlos, Delta is for Cain!”
“D’Anjou! I am d’Anjou! Medusa! Tarn Quan! We have no names, only symbols! For God’s sake, Paris! The Louvre! You saved my life in Paris—as you saved so many lives in Medusa! I am d’Anjou! I told you what you had to know in Paris! You are Jason Bourne! The madman who runs from us is but a creation! My creation!”
Webb stared at the contorted face below, at the perfectly groomed gray moustache and the silver hair that swept back over the aging head. The nightmare had returned … he was in the steaming infested jungles of Tam Quan with no way out and death all around them. Then suddenly he was in Paris, nearing the steps of the Louvre in the blinding afternoon sunlight. Gunshots. Cars screeching, crowds screaming. He had to save the face beneath him! Save the face from Medusa who could supply the missing pieces of the insane puzzle!
“D’Anjou?” whispered Jason. “You’re d’Anjou?”
“If you will give me back my throat,” choked the Frenchman, “I will tell you a story. I’m sure you have one to tell me.”
Philippe d’Anjou surveyed the wreckage of the campsite, now a smoking ruin. He crossed himself as he searched the pockets of the dead “soldier,” removing whatever valuables he found. “We’ll free the man below when we leave,” he said. “There’s no other access to this place. It’s why I posted him there.”
“And told him to look for what?”
“Like you, I’m from Medusa. Fields of grass—poets and consumers notwithstanding—are both avenues and traps. Guerrillas know that. We knew that.”
“You couldn’t have anticipated me.”
“Hardly. But I could and did anticipate every counter-move my creation might consider. He was to arrive alone. The instructions were clear, but who could trust him, least of all me?”
“You’re ahead of me.”
“It’s part of my story. You’ll hear it.”
They walked down through the woods, the elderly d’Anjou gripping the trunks of trees and saplings to ease the descent. They reached the field, hearing the muted screams of the bound guard as they walked into the tall grass. Bourne cut the cloth straps with his knife and the Frenchman paid him.
“Zou ba!” yelled d’Anjou. The man fled into the darkness. “He is garbage. They are all garbage, but they kill willingly for a price and disappear.”
“You tried to kill him tonight, didn’t you? It was a trap.”
“Yes. I thought he was wounded in the explosions. It’s why I went after him.”
“I thought he’d doubled back to take you at the rear.”
“Yes, we would have done that in Medusa—”
“It’s why I thought you were him.” Jason suddenly shouted in fury. “What have you done?”
“It’s part of the story.”
“I want to hear it. Now!”
“There’s a flat stretch of ground several hundred yards, over there to the left,” said the Frenchman, pointing. “It used to be a grazing field, but recently it’s been used by helicopters flying in to meet with an assassin. Let’s go to the far end and rest—and talk. Just in case what remains of the fire draws anyone from the village.”
“It’s five miles away.”
“Still, this is China.”
The clouds had dispersed, blown away with the night winds; the moon was descending, yet was still high enough to wash the distant mountains with its light. The two men of Medusa sat on the ground. Bourne lit a cigarette as d’Anjou spoke. “Do you remember back in Paris, that crowded café where we talked after the madness at the Louvre?”
“Sure. Carlos nearly killed us both that afternoon.”
“You nearly trapped the Jackal.”
“But I didn’t. What about Paris, the café?”
“I told you then I was coming back to Asia. To Singapore or Hong Kong, perhaps the Seychelles, I think I said. France was never good for me—or to me. After Dienbienphu—everything I had was destroyed, blown up by our own troops—the talk of reparations was meaningless. Hollow babbling from hollow men. It’s why I joined Medusa. The only possible way to get back my own was with an American victory.”
“I remember,” said Jason. “What’s that got to do with tonight?”
“As is obvious, I came back to Asia. Since the Jackal had seen me, the routing was circuitous, which left me time to think. I had to make a clear appraisal of my circumstances and the possibilities before me. As I was fleeing for my life, my assets were not extensive but neither were they pathetic. I took the risk of returning to the shop in St. Honoré that afternoon and frankly stole every sou in and out of sight. I knew the combination of the safe, and fortunately it was well endowed. I could comfortably buy myself across the world, out of Carlos’s reach, and live for many weeks without panic. But what was I to do with myself? The funds would run out, and my skills—so apparent in the civilized world—were not such that would permit me to live out the autumn of my life over here in the comfort that was stolen from me. Still, I had not been a snake in the head of Medusa for nothing. God knows I discovered and developed talents I never dreamed were within me—and found, frankly, that morality was not an issue. I had been wronged, and I could wrong others. And nameless, faceless strangers had tried to kill me countless times, so I could assume the responsibility for the death of nameless, faceless other strangers. You see the symmetry, don’t you? At once removed, the equations became abstract.”
“I hear a lot of horseshit,” replied Bourne.
“Then you are not listening, Delta.”
“I’m not Delta.”
“Very well. Bourne.”
“I’m not—go on, perhaps I am.”
“Comment?”
“Rien. Go on.”
“It struck me that regardless of what happened to you in Paris—whether you won or lost, whether you were killed or spared—Jason Bourne was finished. And by all the holy saints, I knew Washington would never utter a word of acknowledgment or clarification; you would simply disappear. ‘Beyond-salvage,’ I believe is the term.”
“I’m aware of it,” said Jason. “So I was finished.”
“Naturellement. But there would be no explanations, there could not be. Mon Dieu, the assassin they invented had gone mad—he had killed! No, there would be nothing. Strategists retreat into the darkest shadows when their plans go—‘off the wire,’ I think is the phrase.”
“I’m aware of that one, too.”
“Bien. Then you can comprehend the solution I found for myself, for the last days of an older man.”
“I’m beginning to.”
“Bien encore. There was a void here in Asia. Jason Bourne was no longer, but his legend was still alive. And there are men who will pay for the services of such an extraordinary man. Therefore I knew what I had to do. It was simply a matter of finding the right contender—”
“Contender?”
“Very well, pretender, if you wish. And train him in the ways of Medusa, in the ways of the most vaunted member of that so unofficial, criminal fraternity. I went to Singapore and searched the caves of the outcasts, often fearing for my life, until I found the man. And I found him quickly, I might add. He was desperate; he had been running for his life for nearly three years, staying, as they say, only steps away from those hunting him. He is an Englishman, a former Royal Commando who got drunk one night and killed seven people in the London streets while in a rage. Because of his outstanding service record he was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Kent, from which he escaped and somehow—God knows how—made his way to Singapore. He had all the tools of the trade; they simply needed to be refined and guided.”
“He looks like me. Like I used to look.”
“Far more now than he did. The basic features were there, also the tall frame and the muscular body; they were assets. It was merely a question of altering a rather prominent nose and rounding a sharper chin than I remembered your having—as Delta, of course. You were different in Paris, but not so radically that I could not recognize you.”
“A commando,” said Jason quietly. “It fits. Who is he?”
“He’s a man without a name but not without a macabre story,” replied d’Anjou, gazing at the mountains in the distance.
“No name …?”
“None he ever gave me that he would not contradict in the next breath—none remotely authentic. He guards that name as if it were the sole extension of his life, its revelation inevitably leading to his death. Of course, he’s right; the present circumstances are a case in point. If I had a name, I could forward it through a blind to the British authorities in Hong Kong. Their computers would light up; specialists would be flown from London and a manhunt that I could never mount would be set in motion. They’d never take him alive—he wouldn’t permit it and they wouldn’t care to—and thus my purpose would be served.”
“Why do the British want him terminated?”
“Suffice it to say that Washington had its Mai Lais and its Medusa, while London has a far more recent military unit led by a homicidal psychotic who left hundreds slaughtered in his wake—few distinctions were made between the innocent and the guilty. He holds too many secrets, which, if exposed, could lead to violent eruptions of revenge throughout the Mideast and Africa. Practicality comes first, you know that. Or you should.”
“He led?” asked Bourne, as stunned as he was bewildered.
“No mere foot soldier he, Delta. He was a captain at twenty-two and a major at twenty-four when rank was next to impossible to obtain due to Whitehall’s service economies. No doubt he’d be a brigadier or even a full general by now if his luck had held out.”
“That’s what he told you?”
“In periodic drunken rages when ugly truths would surface—but never his name. They usually occurred once or twice a month, several days at a time when he’d block out his life in a drunken sea of self-loathing. Yet he was always coherent enough before the outbursts came, telling me to strap him down, confine him, protect him from himself.… He would relive horrible events from his past, his voice hoarse, guttural, hollow. As the drink took over he would describe scenes of torture and mutilation, questioning prisoners with knives puncturing their eyes, and their wrists slit, ordering his captives to watch as their lives flowed out of their veins. So far as I could piece the fragments together, he commanded many of the most dangerous and savage raids against the fanatical uprisings of the late seventies and early eighties, from Yemen down to the bloodbaths in East Africa. In one moment of besotted jubilation he spoke of how Idi Amin himself would stop breathing at the mention of his name, so widespread was his reputation for matching—even surpassing—Amin’s strategy of brutality.” D’Anjou paused, nodding his head slowly and arching his brows in the Gallic acceptance of the inexplicable. “He was subhuman—is subhuman—but for all that a highly intelligent so-called officer and a gentleman. A complete paradox, a total contradiction of the civilized man.… He’d laugh at the fact that his troops despised him and called him an animal yet none ever dared to raise an official complaint. ”
“Why not?” asked Jason, stirred and pained at what he was hearing. “Why didn’t they report him?”
“Because he always brought them out—most of them out—when the order of battle seemed hopeless.”
“I see,” said Bourne, letting the remark ride with the mountain breezes. “No, I don’t see,” he cried angrily, as if suddenly, unexpectedly stung. “Command structure is better than that. Why did his superiors put up with him? They had to know!”
“As I understood his ran tings, he got the jobs done when others couldn’t—or wouldn’t. He learned the secret we in Medusa learned long ago. Play by the enemy’s most ruthless conditions. Change the rules according to the culture. After all, human life to others is not what it is to the Judeo-Christian concept. How could it be? For so many, death is a liberation from intolerable human conditions.”
“Breathing is breathing!” insisted Jason harshly. “Being is being and thinking is thinking!” added David Webb. “He’s a Neanderthal.”
“No more than Delta was at certain times. And you got us out of how many—”
“Don’t say that!” protested the man from Medusa, cutting off the Frenchman. “It wasn’t the same.”
“But certainly a variation,” insisted d’Anjou. “Ultimately the motives do not really matter, do they? Only the results. Or don’t you care to accept the truth? You lived it once. Does Jason Bourne now live with lies?”
“At the moment I simply live—from day to day, from night to night—until it’s over. One way or another.”
“When I want to or have to,” replied Bourne icily. “He’s good, then, isn’t he? Your commando—major without a name. Good at what he does.”
“As good as Delta—perhaps better. You see, he has no conscience, none whatsoever. You, on the other hand, as violent as you were, showed flashes of compassion. Something inside you demanded it. ‘Spare this man,’ you would say. ‘He is a husband, a father, a brother. Incapacitate him, but let him live, let him function later.’ … My creation, your impostor, would never do that. He wants always the final solution—death in front of his eyes.”
“What happened to him? Why did he kill those people in London? Being drunk’s not a good enough reason, not where he’s been.”
“It is if it’s a way of life you can’t resign from.”
“You keep your weapon in place unless you’re threatened. Otherwise you invite the threats.”
“He used no weapon. Only his hands that night in London.”
“What?”
“He stalked the streets looking for imagined enemies—that’s what I gathered from his ravings. ‘It was in their eyes!’ he’d scream. ‘It’s always in the eyes! They know who I am, what I am.’ I tell you, Delta, it was both frightening and tedious, and I never got a name, never a specific reference other than Idi Amin, which any drunken soldier of fortune would use to further himself. To involve the British in Hong Kong would mean involving myself, and, after all, I certainly could not do that. The whole thing’s so frustrating, so I went back to the ways of Medusa. Do it yourself. You taught us that, Delta. You constantly told us—ordered us—to use our imagination. That’s what I did tonight. And I failed, as an old man might be expected to fail.”
“Answer my question,” pressed Bourne. “Why did he kill those people in London?”
“For a reason as banal as it was pointless—and entirely too familiar. He’d been rejected, and his ego could not tolerate that rejection. I sincerely doubt that any other emotion was involved. As with all his indulgences, sexual activity is simply an animal release; no affection is involved, for he has no capacity for it. Mon Dieu, he was so right!”
“Again. What happened?”
“He had returned, wounded, from some particularly brutal duty in Uganda expecting to take up where he left off with a woman in London—someone, I gather, rather highborn, as the English say, a throwback to his earlier days, no doubt. But she refused to see him and hired armed guards to protect her house in Chelsea after he called her. Two of those men were among the seven he killed that night. You see, she claimed his temper was uncontrollable and his bouts of drinking made him murderous, which, of course, they did. But for me he was the perfect contender. In Singapore I followed him outside a disreputable bar and saw him corner two murderous thugs in an alleyway—contrebandiers who had made a great deal of money with a narcotics sale in that filthy waterfront cave—and watched as he backed them against the wall, slashing both their throats with a single sweep of his knife and removing the proceeds from their pockets. I knew then that he had it all. I had found my Jason Bourne. I approached him slowly, silently, my hand extended, holding more money than he had extracted from his victims. We talked. It was the beginning.”
“So Pygmalion created his Galatea, and the first contract you accepted became Aphrodite and gave it life. Bernard Shaw would love you, and I could kill you.”
“To what end? You came to find him tonight. I came to destroy him.”
“Which is part of your story,” said David Webb, looking away from the Frenchman at the fired mountains, thinking of Maine and the life with Marie that had been so violently disrupted. “You bastard!” he suddenly shouted. “I could kill you! Have you any idea what you’ve done?”
“That is your story, Delta. Let me finish mine.”
“Make it neat.… Echo. That was your name, wasn’t it? Echo?” The memories came back.
“Yes, it was. You once told Saigon that you would not travel without ‘old Echo.’ I had to be with your team because I could discern trouble with the tribes and the village chiefs that others could not—which had little to do with my alphabetical symbol. Of course, it was nothing mystic. I had lived in the colonies for ten years. I knew when the Quan-si were lying.”
“Finish your story,” ordered Bourne.
“Betrayal,” said d’Anjou, palms outstretched. “Just as you were created, I created my own Jason Bourne. And just as you went mad, my creation did the same. He turned on me; he became the reality that was my invention. Dismiss Galatea, Delta, he became Frankenstein’s monster with none of that creature’s torment. He broke away from me and began to think for himself, do for himself. Once his desperation left him—with my inestimable help and a surgeon’s knife—his sense of authority came back to him, as well as his arrogance, his ugliness. He considers me a trifle. That’s what he called me, a ‘trifle’! An insignificant nonentity who used him! I who created him!”
“You mean he makes contracts on his own?”
“Perverted contracts, grotesque and extraordinarily dangerous.”
“But I traced him through you, through your arrangements at the Kam Pek casino. Table Five. The telephone number of a hotel in Macao and a name.”
“A method of contact he finds convenient to maintain. And why not? It’s virtually security-proof and what can I do? Go to the authorities and say, ‘See here, gentleman, there’s this fellow I’m somewhat responsible for who insists on using arrangements I created so he can be paid for killing someone.’ He even uses my conduit.”
“The Zhongguo ren with the fast hands and faster feet?”
D’Anjou looked at Jason. “So that’s how you did it, how you found this place. Delta hasn’t lost his touch, n’est-ce pas? Is the man alive?”
“He is, and ten thousand dollars richer.”
“He’s a money-hungry cochon. But I can hardly criticize, I used him myself. I paid him five hundred to pick up and deliver a message.”
“That brought your creation here tonight so you could kill him? What made you so sure he’d come?”
“A Medusan’s instinct, and skeletal knowledge of an extraordinary liaison he has made, a contact so profitable to him and so dangerous it could have all Hong Kong at war, the entire colony paralyzed.”
“I heard that theory before,” said Jason, recalling McAllister’s words spoken that early evening in Maine, “and I still don’t believe it. When killers kill each other, they’re the ones who usually lose. They blow themselves away and informers come out of the woodwork thinking they might be next.”
“If the victims are restricted to such a convenient pattern, certainly you are right. But not when they include a powerful political figure from a vast and aggressive nation.”
Bourne stared at d’Anjou. “China?” he asked softly.
The Frenchman nodded. “Five men were killed in the Tsim Sha Tsui—”
“I know that.”
“Four of those corpses were meaningless. Not the fifth. He was the Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic.”
“Good God!” Jason frowned, the image of a car coming to him. A car with its windows blacked out and an assassin inside. An official government vehicle of the Chinese government.
“My sources tell me that the wires burned between Government House and Beijing, practicality and face winning out—this time. After all, what was the Vice-Premier doing in Kowloon, to begin with? Was such an august leader of the Central Committee also one of the corrupted? But, as I say, that is this time. No, Delta, my creation must be destroyed before he accepts another contract that could plunge us all into an abyss.”
“Sorry, Echo. Not killed. Taken and brought to someone else.”
“That is your story, then?” asked d’Anjou.
“Part of it, yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Only what you have to know. My wife was kidnapped and brought to Hong Kong. To get her back—and I’ll get her back, or every goddamned one of you will die—I have to deliver your son-of-a-bitch creation. And now I’m one step closer because you’re going to help me, and I mean really help me. If you don’t—”
“Threats are unnecessary, Delta,” interrupted the former Medusan. “I know what you can do. I’ve seen you do it. You want him for your reasons and I want him for mine. The order of battle is joined.”