The shorter man inserted the key, turned it silently, then lowered the barrel of the gun to the lock. Three rapid coughs accompanied three flashes of light; the wood surrounding any bolts shattered. The door fell free; the two killers rushed inside.
There were two beats of silence, then an eruption of muffled gunfire, spits and white flashes from the darkness. The door was slammed shut; it would not stay closed, falling back as louder sounds of thrashing and collision came from within the room. Finally a light was found; it was snapped on briefly, then shot out in fury, a lamp sent crashing to the floor, glass shattering. A cry of frenzy exploded from the throat of an infuriated man.
The two killers rushed out, weapons leveled, prepared for a trap, bewildered that there was none. They reached the staircase and raced down as a door to the right of the invaded room opened. A blinking guest peered out, then shrugged and went back inside. Silence returned to the darkened hallway.
Bourne held his place, his arm around Marie St. Jacques. She was trembling, her head pressed into his chest, sobbing quietly, hysterically, in disbelief. He let the minutes pass, until the trembling subsided and deep breaths replaced the sobs. He could not wait any longer; she had to see for herself. See completely, the impression indelible; she had to finally understand. I am Cain. I am death.
“Come on,” he whispered.
He led her out into the hallway, guiding her firmly toward the room that was now his ultimate proof. He pushed the broken door open and they walked inside.
She stood motionless, both repelled and hypnotized by the sight. In an open doorway on the right was the dim silhouette of a figure, the light behind it so muted only the outline could be seen, and only then when the eyes adjusted to the strange admixture of darkness and glow. It was the figure of a woman in a long gown, the fabric moving gently in the breeze of an open window.
Window. Straight ahead was a second figure, barely visible but there, its shape an obscure blot indistinctly outlined by the wash of light from the distant highway. Again, it seemed to move, brief, spastic flutterings of cloth—of arms.
“Oh, God,” said Marie, frozen. “Turn on the lights, Jason.”
“None of them work,” he replied. “Only two table lamps; they found one.” He walked across the room cautiously and reached the lamp he was looking for; it was on the floor against the wall. He knelt down and turned it on; Marie shuddered.
Strung across the bathroom door, held in place by threads torn from a curtain, was her long dress, rippling from an unseen source of wind. It was riddled with bullet holes.
Against the far window, Bourne’s shirt and trousers had been tacked to the frame, the panes by both sleeves smashed, the breeze rushing in, causing the fabric to move up and down. The white cloth of the shirt was punctured in a half-dozen places, a diagonal line of bullets across the chest.
“There’s your message,” said Jason. “Now you know what it is. And now I think you’d better listen to what I have to say.”
Marie did not answer him. Instead, she walked slowly to the dress, studying it as if not believing what she saw. Without warning, she suddenly spun around, her eyes guttering, the tears arrested. “No! It’s wrong! Something’s terribly wrong! Call the embassy.”
“What?”
“Do as I say. Now!”
“Stop it, Marie. You’ve got to understand.”
“No, goddamn you! You’ve got to understand! It wouldn’t happen this way. It couldn’t.”
“It did.”
“Call the embassy! Use that phone over there and call it now! Ask for Corbelier. Quickly, for God’s sake! If I mean anything to you, do as I ask!”
Bourne could not deny her. Her intensity was killing both herself and him. “What do I tell him?” he asked, going to the telephone.
“Get him first! That’s what I’m afraid of … oh, God. I’m frightened!”
“What’s the number?”
She gave it to him; he dialed, holding on interminably for the switchboard to answer. When it finally did, the operator was in panic, her words rising and falling, at moments incomprehensible. In the background he could hear shouts, sharp commands voiced rapidly in English and in French. Within seconds he learned why.
Dennis Corbelier, Canadian attaché, had walked down the steps of the embassy on the avenue Montaigne at 1:40 in the morning and had been shot in the throat. He was dead.
“There’s the other part of the message, Jason,” whispered Marie, drained, staring at him. “And now I’ll listen to anything you have to say. Because there is someone out there trying to reach you, trying to help you. A message was sent, but not to us, not to me. Only to you, and only you were to understand it.”
22
One by one the four men arrived at the crowded Hilton Hotel on Sixteenth Street in Washington, D.C. Each went to a separate elevator, taking it two or three floors above or below his destination, walking the remaining flights to the correct level. There was no time to meet outside the limits of the District of Columbia; the crisis was unparalleled. These were the men of Treadstone Seventy-One—those that remained alive. The rest were dead, slaughtered in a massacre on a quiet, tree-lined street in New York.
Two of the faces were familiar to the public, one more than the other. The first belonged to the aging senator from Colorado, the second was Brigadier General I. A. Crawford—Irwin Arthur, freely translated as Iron Ass—acknowledged spokesman for Army Intelligence and defender of the G-2 data banks. The other two men were virtually unknown except within the corridors of their own operations. One was a middle-aged naval officer, attached to information Control, 5th Naval District. The fourth and last man was a forty-six-year-old veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, a slender, coiled spring of anger who walked with a cane. His foot had been blown off by a grenade in Southeast Asia; he had been a deep-cover agent with the Medusa operation at the time. His name was Alexander Conklin.
There was no conference table in the room; it was an ordinary double occupancy with the standard twin beds, a couch, two armchairs, and a coffee table. It was an unlikely spot to hold a meeting of such consequence; there were no spinning computers to light up dark screens with green letters, no electronic communications equipment that would reach consoles in London or Paris or Istanbul. It was a plain hotel room, devoid of everything but four minds that held the secrets of Treadstone Seventy-One.
The senator sat on one end of the couch, the naval officer at the other. Conklin lowered himself into an armchair, stretching his immobile limb out in front of him, the cane between his legs, while Brigadier General Crawford remained standing, his face flushed, the muscles of his jaw pulsing in anger.
“I’ve reached the president,” said the senator, rubbing his forehead, the lack of sleep apparent in his bearing. “I had to; we’re meeting tonight. Tell me everything you can, each of you. You begin, General. What in the name of God happened?”
“Major Webb was to meet his car at 2300 hours on the corner of Lexington and Seventy-second Street. The time was firm, but he didn’t show up. By 2330 the driver became alarmed because of the distance to the airfield in New Jersey. The sergeant remembered the address—mainly because he’d been told to forget it—drove around and went to the door. The security bolts had been jammed and the door just swung open; all the alarms had been shorted out. There was blood on the foyer floor, the dead woman on the staircase. He walked down the hallway into the operations room and found the bodies.”
“That man deserves a very quiet promotion,” said the naval officer.
“Why do you say that?” asked the senator.
Crawford replied. “He had the presence of mind to call the Pentagon and insist on speaking with covert transmissions, domestic. He specified the scrambler frequency, the time and the place of reception, and said he had to speak with the sender. He didn’t say a word to anyone until he got me on the phone.”
“Put him in the War College, Irwin,” said Conklin grimly, holding his cane. “He’s brighter than most of the clowns you’ve got over there.”
“That’s not only unnecessary, Conklin,” admonished the senator, “but patently offensive. Go on, please, General.”
Crawford exchanged looks with the CIA man. “I reached Colonel Paul McClaren in New York, ordered him over there, and told him to do absolutely nothing until I arrived. I then phoned Conklin and George here, and we flew up together.”
“I called a Bureau print team in Manhattan,” added Conklin. “One we’ve used before and can trust. I didn’t tell them what we were looking for, but I told them to sweep the place and give what they found only to me.” The CIA man stopped, lifting his cane in the direction of the naval officer. “Then George fed them thirty-seven names, all men whose prints we knew were in the FBI files. They came up with the one set we didn’t expect, didn’t want … didn’t believe.”