The grisly photograph was taken on the white conference table by a sterile house technician under the reluctant supervision of Morris Panov. A bloodstained white sheet covered Webb’s body; it was angled across his throat revealing a blood-streaked face, the eyes wide, the features clear.
“Develop the roll as fast as you can and bring me the contacts,” instructed Conklin.
“Twenty minutes,” said the technician, heading for the door, as McAllister entered the room.
“What’s happening?” asked David, sitting up on the table. Marie, wincing, wiped his face with a warm, wet towel.
“The consulate press people called the media,” replied the undersecretary. “They said they’d issue a statement in an hour or so, as soon as all the facts were in place. They’re mocking one up now. I gave them the scenario with a go-ahead to use my name. They’ll work it out with embassy obfuscation and read it to us before issuing it.”
“Any word on Lin?” asked the CIA man.
“A message from the doctor. He’s still critical but holding on.”
“What about the press down the road?” asked Havilland. “We’ve got to let them in here sooner or later. The longer we wait, the more they’ll think it’s a cover-up. We can’t afford that, either.”
“We’ve still got some rope in that area,” said McAllister. “I sent word that the police—at great risk to themselves—were sweeping the grounds for undetonated explosives. Reporters can be very patient under those conditions. Incidentally, in the scenario I gave the press people, I told them to stress the fact that the man who attacked the house was obviously an expert with demolitions.”
Jason Bourne, one of the most proficient demolitions men to come out of Medusa, looked at McAllister. The undersecretary looked away. “I’ve got to get out of here,” Jason said. “I’ve got to get to Macao as quickly as possible.”
“David, for God’s sake!” Marie stood in front of her husband, staring at him, her voice low and intense.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” said Webb, getting off the table. “I wish it didn’t,” he repeated softly, “but it does. I have to be in place. I have to start the sequence to reach Sheng before the story breaks in the morning papers, before that photograph appears confirming the message I’m sending through channels he’s convinced no one knows about. He’s got to believe I’m his assassin, the man he was going to kill, not the Jason Bourne from Medusa who tried to kill him in that forest glen. He has to get word from me—from who he thinks I am—before he’s given any other information. Because the information I’m sending him is the last thing he wants to hear. Everything else will seem insignificant.”
“The bait,” said Alex Conklin. “Feed him the critical information first and the cover falls in place because he’s stunned, preoccupied, and accepts the printed official version, in particular the photograph in the newspapers.”
“What are you going to tell him?” asked the ambassador, his voice conveying the fact that he disliked the prospect of losing control of this blackest of operations.
“What you told me. Part truth, part lie.”
“Spell it out, Mr. Webb,” said Havilland firmly. “We owe you a great deal but—”
“You owe me what you can’t pay me!” snapped Jason Bourne, interrupting. “Unless you blow your brains out right here in front of me.”
“I understand your anger, but still I must insist. You’ll do nothing to jeopardize the lives of five million people, or the vital interests of the United States government.”
“I’m glad you got the sequence right—for once. All right, Mr. Ambassador, I’ll tell you. It’s what I would have told you before, if you’d had the decency, the decency, to come to me and ‘state your case.’ I’m surprised it never occurred to you—no, not surprised, shocked—but I guess I shouldn’t be. You believe in your rarefied manipulations, in the trappings of your quiet power … you probably think you deserve it all because of your great intellect, or something like that. You’re all the same. You relish complexity—and your explanations of it—so that you can’t see when the simple route is a hell of a lot more effective.”
“I’m waiting to be instructed,” said Havilland coldly.
“So be it,” said Bourne. “I listened very carefully during your ponderous explanation. You took pains to explain why no one could officially approach Sheng and tell him what you knew. You were right, too. He’d have laughed in your face, or spit in your eye, or told you to pound sand—whatever you like. Sure, he would’ve. He’s got the leverage. You pursue your ‘outrageous’ accusations, he pulls Peking out of the Hong Kong Accords. You lose. You try to go over his head, good luck. You lose again. You have no proof but the words of several dead men who’ve had their throats cut, members of the Kuomintang who’d say anything to discredit party officials in the People’s Republic. He smiles and, without saying it, lets you know that you’d better go along with him. You figure you can’t go along because the risks are too great—if the whistle blows on Sheng, the Far East blows. You were right about that, too—more for the reasons ‘Edward’ gave us than you did. Peking might possibly overlook a corrupt commission as one of those temporary concessions to greed, but it won’t permit a spreading Chinese Mafia to infiltrate its industry or its labor forces or its government. As ‘Edward’ said, they could lose their jobs—”
“I’m still waiting, Mr. Webb,” said the diplomat.
“Okay. You recruited me, but you forgot the lesson of Treadstone Seventy-one. Send out an assassin to catch an assassin.”
“That’s the one thing we did not forget,” broke in the diplomat, now astonished. “We based everything on it.”
“For the wrong reasons,” said Bourne sharply. “There was a better way to reach Sheng and draw him out for the kill. I wasn’t necessary. My wife wasn’t necessary! But you couldn’t see it. Your superior brain had to complicate everything.”
“What was it I couldn’t see, Mr. Webb?”
“Send in a conspirator to catch a conspirator. Unofficially.… It’s too late for that now, but it’s what I would have told you.”
“I’m not sure you’ve told me anything.”
“Part truth, part lie—your own strategy. A courier is sent to Sheng, preferably a half-senile old man who’s been paid by a blind and fed the information over the phone. No traceable source. He carries a verbal message, ears only, Sheng’s only, nothing on paper. The message contains enough of the truth to paralyze Sheng. Let’s say that the man sending it is someone in Hong Kong who stands to lose millions if Sheng’s scheme falls apart, a man smart enough and frightened enough not to use his name. The message could allude to leaks, or traitors in the boardrooms, or excluded triads banding together because they’ve been cut out—all the things you’re certain will happen. The truth. Sheng has to follow up, he can’t afford not to. Contacts are made and a meeting is arranged. The Hong Kong conspirator is every bit as anxious to protect himself as Sheng, and every bit as leery, demanding a neutral meeting ground. It’s set. It’s the trap.” Bourne paused, glancing at McAllister. “Even a third-rate demolitions grunt could show you how to carry it off.”
“Very quick and very professional,” said the ambassador. “And with a glaring flaw. Where do we find such a conspirator in Hong Kong?”
Jason Bourne studied the elder statesman, his expression bordering on contempt. “You make him up,” he said. “That’s the lie.”
Havilland and Alex Conklin were alone in the white-walled room, each at either end of the conference table facing the other. McAllister and Morris Panov had gone to the undersecretary’s office to listen on separate telephones to a mocked-up profile of an American killer created by the consulate for the benefit of the press. Panov had agreed to provide the appropriate psychiatric terminology with the correct Washington overtones. David Webb had asked to be alone with his wife until it was time to leave. They had been taken to a room upstairs; the fact that it was a bedroom had not occurred to anyone. It was merely a door to an empty room at the south side of the old Victorian house, away from the water-soaked men and ruins on the north side. Webb’s departure had been estimated by McAllister to be in fifteen minutes or less. A car would drive Jason Bourne and the undersecretary to Kai-tak Airport. In the interests of speed and because the hydrofoils stopped running at 2100 hours, a medical helicopter would fly them to Macao, where all immigration permits would be cleared for the delivery of emergency supplies to the Kiang Wu Hospital on the Rua Coelho do Amaral.
“It wouldn’t have worked, you know,” said Havilland, looking over at Conklin.
“What wouldn’t have?” asked the man from Langley, his own thoughts broken off by the diplomat’s statement. “What David told you?”
“Sheng never would have agreed to a meeting with someone he didn’t know, with someone who didn’t identify himself.”
“It’d depend on how it was presented. That kind of thing always does. If the critical information is mind-blowing and the facts authentic, the subject doesn’t have much of a choice. He can’t question the messenger—he doesn’t know anything—so he has to go after the source. As Webb put it, he can’t afford not to.”
“Webb?” asked the ambassador flatly, his brows arched.
“Bourne, Delta. Who the hell knows? The strategy’s sound.”
“There are too many possible miscalculations, too many chances for a misstep when one side invents a mythical party.”
“Tell that to Jason Bourne.”
“Different circumstances. Treadstone had a willing agent provocateur to go after the Jackal. An obsessed man who chose extreme risk because he was trained for it and had lived with violence too long to let go. He didn’t want to let go. There was no place else for him.”
“It’s academic,” said Conklin, “but I don’t think you’re in a position to argue with him. You sent him out with all the odds against him and he comes back with the assassin in tow—and he finds you. If he said it could be done another way, he’s probably right, and you can’t say he isn’t.”
“I can say, however,” said Havilland, resting his forearms on the table and fixing his eyes on the CIA man, “that what we did really did work. We lost the assassin, but we gained a willing, even obsessed provocateur. From the beginning he was the optimum choice, but we never for a minute thought that he could be recruited to do the final job willingly by himself. Now he won’t let anybody else do it; he’s going back in, demanding his right to do it. So in the end we were right—I was right. One sets the forces in motion, on a collision course, always watching, ready to abort, to kill, if one has to, but knowing that as the complications mount and the closer they come to each other’s throat, the nearer the solution is. Ultimately—in their hatreds, their suspicions, their passions—they create their own violence, and the job is done. You may lose your own people, but one has to weigh that loss against what it’s worth to disrupt the enemy, to expose him.”
“You also risk exposing your own hand, the hand you insisted has to be kept out of sight.”
“How so?”
“Because it’s not the end yet. Say Webb doesn’t make it. Say he’s caught, and you can bet your elegant ass the order will be to take him alive. When a man like Sheng sees that a trap is set to kill him, he’ll want to know who’s behind it. If pulling out a fingernail or ten doesn’t do it—and it probably wouldn’t—they’ll needle him full of juice and find out where he comes from. He’s heard everything you’ve told him—”
“Even down to the point where the United States government cannot be involved,” interrupted the diplomat.
“That’s right, and he won’t be able to help himself. The chemicals will bring it all out. Your hand’s revealed. Washington is involved.”
“By whom?”
“By Webb, for Christ’s sake! By Jason Bourne, if you like.”
“By a man with a history of mental illness, with a record of random aggression and self-deception? A paranoid schizophrenic whose logged telephone calls show a man disintegrating into dementia, making insane accusations, wild threats aimed at those trying to help him?” Havilland paused, then added quietly, “Come now, Mr. Conklin, such a man does not speak for the United States government. How could he? We’ve been searching for him everywhere. He’s an irrational, fantasizing time bomb who finds conspiracies wherever his sick, tortured mind takes him. We want him back in therapy. We also suspect that because of his past activities he left the country with an illegal passport—”
“Therapy …?” Alex broke in, stunned by the old man’s words. “Past activities?”
“Of course, Mr. Conklin. If it’s necessary, especially over a hot line—Sheng’s hot line—we’re willing to admit that he once worked for the government and was severely damaged by that work. But in no way is it possible he would have any official standing. Again, how could he? This tragic, violent man may have been responsible for the death of a wife he claims disappeared.”
“Marie? You’d use Marie?”
“We’d have to. She’s in the logs, in the affidavits volunteered by men who knew Webb as a mental patient, who tried to help him.”
“Oh, Jesus!” whispered Alex, mesmerized by the cold, precise elder statesman of covert operations. “You told him everything because you had your own backups. Even if he was taken, you could cover your ass with official logs, psychiatric evaluation—you could disassociate yourself! Oh, God, you bastard.”
“I told him the truth because he would have known it if I tried to lie to him again. McAllister, of course, went further, emphasizing the organized crime factor which is all too true but a sensitive issue I’d prefer not to bring up. Nobody does. But then I didn’t tell Edward everything. He hasn’t yet put enough distance between his ethics and the demands of his job. When he does, he may join me on the heights, but I don’t think he’s capable.”
“You told David everything in case he was taken,” went on Conklin, not listening to Havilland. “If the kill doesn’t happen, you want him taken. You’re counting on the amphetamines and the scopolamine. The drugs! Then Sheng will get the message that his conspiracy’s known to us and he’ll get it unofficially, not from us but from an unsanctioned mental case. Jesus! It’s a variation of what Webb told you!”
“Unofficially,” agreed the diplomat. “So much is achieved that way. No confrontations, very smooth. Very cheap. No cost at all, really.”
“Except a man’s life!” shouted Alex. “He’ll be killed. He has to be killed from everyone’s point of view.”
“The price, Mr. Conklin, if it must be paid.”
Alex waited, as if he expected Havilland to finish his statement. Nothing was forthcoming, only the strong, sad eyes gazing into his. “That’s all you’ve got to say? It’s the price—if it has to be paid?”
“The stakes are far higher than we imagined—far higher. You know that as well as I do, so don’t look so shocked.” The ambassador leaned back in his chair somewhat stiffly. “You’ve made such decisions before, such calculations.”
“Not like this. Never like this! You send in your own and you know the risks, but you don’t set up a field man sealing off his escape route! He was better off believing—believing—he was bringing in the assassin to get his wife back!”
“The objective is different. Infinitely more vital.”
“I know that. Then you don’t send him! You get the codes and send someone else! Someone who isn’t half dead from exhaustion!”
“Exhausted or not, he’s the best man for the job and he insists on doing it.”
“Because he doesn’t know what you’ve done! How you’ve boxed him in, made him the messenger who has to be killed!”
“I had no choice. As you say, he found me. I had to tell him the truth.”
“Then, I repeat, send in someone else! A hit team recruited on the outside by a blind, no connection to us, just payment for a professional kill, the target Sheng. Webb knows how to reach Sheng, he told you that. I’ll convince him to give you the codes or the sequence or whatever the hell it is, and you buy a hit team!”
“You’d put us on a level with the Qaddafis of this world?”
“That’s so puerile I can’t find words to—”
“Forget it,” broke in Havilland. “If it was ever traced back to us—and it could be—we’d have to launch against China before they dropped something on us. Unthinkable.”
“What you’re doing here is unthinkable!”
“There are more important priorities than the survival of a single individual, Mr. Conklin, and again you know that as well as I do. It’s been your life’s work—if you’ll forgive me—but the present case is on a higher level than anything you ever experienced. Let’s call it a geopolitical level.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Your own guilt is showing now, Alex—if I may call you Alex—since you call in question my immediate family line. I never put Jason Bourne beyond-salvage. My most fervent hope is that he’ll succeed, that the kill will take place. If that happens, he’s free; the Far East is rid of a monster and the world will be spared an Oriental Sarajevo. That’s my job, Alex.”
“At least tell him! Warn him!”
“I can’t. Any more than you would in my position. You don’t tell a tueur à gages—”
“Come again, elegant ass?”
“A man sent in to kill must have the confidence of his convictions. He can’t, for a second, reflect on his motives or his reasons. He must have no doubts at all. None. The obsession must be intact. It’s his only chance to succeed.”
“Suppose he doesn’t succeed? Suppose he’s killed?”
“Then we start again as quickly as possible putting someone else in his place. McAllister will be with him in Macao and learn the sequence codes to reach Sheng. Bourne’s agreed to that. If the worst happens, we might even try his conspirator-for-a-conspirator theory. He says it’s too late, but he could be wrong. You see, I’m not above learning, Alex.”
“You’re not above anything,” Conklin said angrily, getting out of the chair. “But you forgot something—you forgot what you said to David. There’s a glaring flaw.”
“What’s that?”
“I won’t let you get away with it.” Alex limped toward the door. “You can ask so much of a man, but there comes a point when you don’t ask any more. You’re out, elegant ass. Webb’s going to be told the truth. The whole truth.”
Conklin opened the door. He faced the back of a tall marine, who, upon hearing the sound of the door opening, did a precise about-face, his rifle at port arms.
“Get out of my way, soldier,” said Alex.
“Sorry, sir!” barked the marine, his eyes distant, staring straight ahead.
Conklin turned back to the diplomat seated behind the desk. Havilland shrugged. “Procedures,” he said.
“I thought these people were out of here. I thought they were sequestered at the airport.”
“The ones you saw are. These are a squad from the consulate contingent. Thanks to Downing Street’s bending a few rules, this is officially U.S. territory now. We are entitled to a military presence.”
“I want to see Webb!”
“You can’t. He’s leaving.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“My name is Raymond Oliver Havilland. I am ambassador-at-large for the government of the United States of America. My decisions are to be carried out without debate during periods of crisis. This is a period of crisis. Fuck off, Alex.”
Conklin closed the door and walked awkwardly back to his chair. “What’s next, Mr. Ambassador? Do the three of us get bullets in our heads or are we given lobotomies?”
“I’m sure we can all come to a mutual understanding.”
They held each other, Marie knowing that he was only partly there, only partly himself. It was Paris all over again, when she knew a desperate man named Jason Bourne, who was trying to stay alive, but not sure he would, or even should, his self-doubts in some ways as lethal to him as those who wanted him killed. But it was not Paris. There were no self-doubts now, no tactics feverishly improvised to elude pursuers, no race to trap the hunters. What reminded her of Paris was the distance she felt between them. David was trying to reach her—generous David, compassionate David—but Jason Bourne would not let him go. Jason was now the hunter, not the hunted, and this strengthened his will. It was summed up in a word he used with staccato regularity: Move!
“Why, David? Why?”
“I told you. Because I can. Because I have to. Because it has to be done.”
“That’s not an answer, my darling.”
“All right.” Webb gently released his wife and held her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes. “For us, then.”
“Us?”
“Yes. I’d see those images for the rest of my life. They’d keep coming back and they’d tear me apart because I’d know what I left behind and I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’d go into tailspins and take you with me because for all your brains you haven’t the sense to bail out.”
“I’d rather go into senseless tailspins with you than without you. Read that as seeing you alive.”
“That’s not an argument.”
“I think it’s considerable.”
“I’ll be calling the moves, not making them.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I want Sheng taken out, I mean that. He doesn’t deserve to live, but I won’t be doing the taking—”
“The God image doesn’t suit you!” interrupted Marie sharply. “Let others make that decision. Walk away from it. Stay safe.”
“You’re not listening to me. I was there and I saw him—heard him. He doesn’t deserve to live. In one of his diatribes he called life a precious gift. That may be debatable, depending on the life, but life doesn’t mean a thing to him. He wants to kill—maybe he has to, I don’t know, ask Panov—it’s in his eyes. He’s Hitler and Mengele and Genghis Khan … the chain-saw killer—whatever—but he has to go. And I have to make sure he goes.”
“But why?” pleaded Marie. “You haven’t answered me!”
“I did, but you didn’t hear me. One way or another I’d see him every day, hear that voice. I’d be watching him toy with terrified people before killing them, butchering them. Try to understand. I’ve tried and I’m no expert, but I’ve learned a few things about myself. Only an idiot wouldn’t. It’s the images, Marie, the goddamned pictures that keep coming back, opening doors—memories I don’t want to know about, but have to. The clearest and simplest way I can put it is that I can’t take any more. I can’t add to that collection of bad surprises. You see, I want to get better—not entirely cured, I can accept that, live with it—but I can’t slide back, either. I won’t slide back. For both our sakes.”
“And you think by engineering a man’s death you’ll get rid of those images?”
“I think it’ll help, yes. Everything’s relative, and I wouldn’t be here if Echo hadn’t thrown his life away so I could live. It’s not always fashionable to say it, but like most people I have a conscience. Or maybe it’s guilt because I survived. I simply have to do it because I can.”
“You’ve convinced yourself?”
“Yes, I have. I’m best equipped.”
“And you say you’re calling the moves, not making them?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m coming back because I want a long life with you, lady.”
“What’s my guarantee? Who’s going to make the moves?”
“The whore who got us into this.”
“Havilland?”
“No, he’s the pimp. McAllister’s the whore, he always was. The man who believes in decency, who wears it on his sleeve until the power boys ask him to put out. He’ll probably call in the pimp and that’s fine. Between them they can do it.”
“But how?”
“There are men—and women—who will kill if the price is high enough. They may not have the egos of the mythical Jason Bourne or the very real Carlos the Jackal, but they’re everywhere in that goddamned filthy shadow world. Edward, the whore, told us he made enemies throughout the Far East, from Hong Kong to the Philippines, from Singapore to Tokyo, all in the name of Washington, who wanted influence over here. If you make enemies, you know who they are, know the signals to send out to reach them. That’s what the whore and the pimp are going to do. I’ll set up the kill, but someone else will do the killing, and I don’t care how many millions it costs them. I’ll watch from a distance to make sure that the butcher’s killed, that Echo gets what’s coming to him, that the Far East is rid of a monster who can plunge it into a terrible war—but that’s all I’ll do. Watch. McAllister doesn’t know it, but he’s coming with me. We’re extracting our pound of flesh.”
“Who’s talking now?” asked Marie. “David or Jason?”
The husband paused, his silent thoughts deep. “Bourne,” he said finally. “It has to be Bourne until I’m back.”
“You know that?”
“I accept it. I don’t have a choice.”
There was a soft, rapid knocking at the bedroom door. “Mr. Webb. It’s McAllister. It’s time to leave.”