‘Everything’s timed and officially cleared down to the minute,’ the analyst snapped, fear now in his voice. There’s no room for someone to become any more curious than necessary. Everything has to be clockwork. Hurry?
The interns dressed; the caps were pulled low and the receipts for the canisters of blood were in their pockets. The doctor issued his last instructions to the Americans as he handed them two orange hospital passes. ‘We’ll go out together; the door locks automatically. I will immediately escort our young doctors, thanking them loudly and profusely past the police ranks until they can dash to the aircraft. You head to the right, then left into the front lobby and the entrance. I hope – I really do hope – that our association, as pleasant as it has been, is now finished.’
‘What are these for?’ asked McAllister, holding up his hospital pass.
‘Probably – hopefully – nothing. But in case you are stopped they explain your presence and will not be questioned.’
‘Why? What do they say? There was no fact, no fragment of data that the analyst could leave unexplained.
‘Quite simply,’ said the doctor, looking calmly at McAllister. They describe you as indigent expatriates, totally without funds, whom I generously treat at my clinic without charge. For gonorrhea, to be precise. Naturally, there are the usual identifying features – height, approximate weight, hair and eye colouring, nationality. Yours are more complete, I’m afraid, as I had not met your friend. Naturally again, there are duplicates in my files, and no one could mistake it was you, sir.’
‘What?
‘Once you are out on the streets 1 believe my longstanding debt is cancelled. Wouldn’t you agree?
”Gonorrhea?”
‘Please, sir, as you say, we must hurry. Everything clockwork.’ The doctor opened the door, ushered out the four men and instantly headed to the left with the two young Portuguese towards the side entrance and the medical helicopter.
‘Let’s go,’ whispered Bourne, touching McAllister’s arm and starting to the right.’
‘Did you hear that man?
‘You said he was a thief.’
‘He was. /s/’
‘There are times when a person shouldn’t take that bromide about stealing from a thief too literally.’
‘What does that mean?
‘Simply this,’ said Jason Bourne, looking down at the analyst at his side. ‘He’s got you on several counts. Collusion, corrupt practices, and gonorrhea.’
‘Oh, my God.’
They stood at the rear of the crowds by the high fence watching the helicopter roar up from the landing zone and then soar off into the night sky. One by one the searchlights were turned off, and the parking lot was once again lit by its dim lamps. Most of the police climbed into a van; those remaining walked casually back to their previous posts while several of them lighted cigarettes, as if to proclaim the excitement over. The crowds began to disperse amid questions hurled at anyone and everyone. Who was it? Someone very important, no? What do you think happened? Do you think we II ever be told? Who cares? We had our show so let’s have a drink, yes? Will you look at that woman? A first-class whore, I think, don’t you agree? She’s my first cousin, you bastard.’
The excitement was over.
‘Let’s go,’ said Jason. ‘We have to move.’
‘You know, Mr Webb, you have two commands you use with irritating frequency. “Move” and “Let’s go”.’
They work.’ Both men started across the Do Amaral.
‘I’m as aware as you are that we must move quickly, only you haven’t explained where we’re going.’
‘I know I haven’t,’ said Bourne.
‘I think it’s time you did.’ They kept walking, Bourne picking up the pace. ‘You called me a whore,’ continued the undersecretary.
‘You are.’
‘Because I agreed to do what I thought was right, what had to be done?
‘Because they used you. The boys in power used you and they’ll throw you away without thinking twice. You saw limousines and high-level conferences in your future and you couldn’t resist. You were willing to throw away my life without looking for an alternative – which is what you’re paid to do. You were willing to risk the life of my wife because the pull was too great. Dinners with the Forty Committee, perhaps even a member; quiet, confidential meetings in the Oval Office with the celebrated Ambassador Havilland. To me that’s being a whore. Only, I repeat, they’ll throw you out without a second thought.’
Silence. For nearly a long Macao block. ‘You think I don’t know that, Mr Bourne?
‘What?
That they’ll throw me out.’
Again Jason looked down at the meticulous bureaucrat at his side. ‘You know that?
‘Of course I do. I’m not in their league and they don’t want me in it. Oh, I’ve got the credentials and the mind, but I don’t have that extraordinary sense of performance that they have. I’m not prepossessing. I’d freeze in front of a television camera – although 1 watch idiots who do perform consistently make the most ridiculous errors. So, you see, I recognize my limitations. And since I can’t do what these men can do, I have to do what’s best for them and for the country. I have to think for them.’
‘You thought for Havilland! You came to us in Maine and took my wife from me! There weren’t any other options in that swollen brain of yours?
‘None that I could come up with. None that covered everything as thoroughly as Havilland’s strategy. The assassin was the untraceable link to Sheng. If you could hunt him down and bring him in, it was the short-cut we needed to draw Sheng out.’
‘You had a hell of a lot more confidence in me than I did.’
‘We had confidence in Jason Bourne. In Cain – in the man from Medusa called Delta. You had the strongest motive possible: To get your wife back, the wife you love very much. And there would be no connection whatsoever to our government-‘
‘We smelled a covert scenario from the beginning!’ exploded Bourne. 7 smelled it, and so did Conklin.’
‘Smelling isn’t tasting,’ protested the analyst, as they rushed down a dark cobble stoned alley. ‘You knew nothing concrete that you could have divulged, no intermediary who pointed to Washington. You were obsessed with finding a killer who was posing as you so that an enraged taipan would return your wife to you – a man whose own wife had supposedly been murdered by the assassin who called himself Jason Bourne. At first I thought it was madness, but then I saw the serpentine logic of it all. Havilland was right. If there was one man alive who could bring in the assassin, and in that way neutralize Sheng, it was you. But you couldn’t have any connection to Washington. Therefore you had to be manoeuvred within the framework of an extraordinary lie. Anything less, and you might have reacted more normally. You might have gone to the police, or government authorities, people you knew in the past – what you could remember of the past, which was also to our advantage.’
‘I did go to people I knew before.’
‘And learned nothing except that the more you threatened to break silence, the more likely it was that the government would put you back in therapy. After all, you came from Medusa and had a history of amnesia, even schizophrenia.’
‘Conklin went to others-‘
‘And was initially told only enough for us to find out what he knew, what he’d pieced together. I gather he was once one of the best we had.’
‘He was. He still is.’
‘He put you beyond-salvage.’
‘History. Under the circumstances, I might have done the same. He learned a lot more than I did in Washington.’
‘He was led to believe exactly what he wanted to believe. It was one of Havilland’s really more brilliant strokes and done at a moment’s notice. Remember, Alexander Conklin is a burned-out, bitter man. He has no love for the world he spent his adult life in or for the people with whom he shared that life. He was told that a possible black operation might have gone off the wire, that the scenario might have been taken over by hostile elements.’ McAllister paused as they emerged from the alley and rounded a corner in the late-night Macao crowds; coloured lights were flashing everywhere. ‘It was back to the square-one lie, don’t you see?’ continued the analyst. ‘Conklin was convinced that someone else had moved in, that your situation was hopeless and so was your wife’s unless you followed the new scenario run by the hostile elements that had taken over.’
That’s what he told me,’ said Jason, frowning, remembering the lounge at Dulles Airport and the tears that had come to his eyes. ‘He told me to play out the scenario.’
‘He had no choice.’ McAllister suddenly gripped Bourne’s arm, nodding towards a darkened storefront up ahead on the right. ‘We have to talk.’