‘It’d be a stretch for you,’ agreed the psychiatrist softly. ‘Then everything I’ve just told you you’re hearing for the first time and none of it makes sense? It’s not the way you recall things?’
‘Mo, it’s all a lie! 1 never called State. McAllister came to the house and told us both everything I’ve told you, including the Yao Ming story! And now she’s gone, and I’ve been given a lead to follow. Why? For Christ’s sake, what are they doing to us?’
‘I asked about McAllister,’ said Panov, his tone suddenly angry. The Fast East deputy checked with State posting and called me back. They say McAllister flew into Hong Kong two weeks ago, that according to his very precise calendar he couldn’t have been at your house in Maine. ‘
‘He was here!’
‘I think I believe you. ‘
‘What does that mean?’
‘Among other things, I can hear the truth in your voice, sometimes when you can’t. Also that phrase “making a mockery” of something isn’t generally in the vocabulary of a psychotic in a highly agitated state – certainly not in yours at your wildest. ‘
‘I’m not with you. ‘
‘Someone saw where you worked and what you did for a living and thought he’d add a little upgraded verbiage. Local colour, in your case.’ Then Panov exploded. ‘My God, what are they doing?’
‘Locking me into a starting gate,’ said Webb softly. They’re forcing me to go after whatever it is they want. ‘
‘Sons of bitches}’
‘It’s called recruitment.’ David stared at the wall. ‘Stay away. Mo, there’s nothing you can do. They’ve got all their pieces in place. I’m recruited.’ He hung up.
Dazed, Webb walked out of his small office and stood in the Victorian hallway surveying the upturned furniture and the broken lamps, china and glass strewn across the floor of the living room beyond. Then words spoken by Panov earlier in the terrible conversation came to him: They’re so incriminating. ‘
approached the front door and opened it. He forced himself to look at the hand print in the centre of the upper panel, the dried blood dull and dark in the light of the carriage lamps. Then he drew closer and examined it.
It was the imprint of a hand but not a handprint. There was the outline of a hand – the impression, the palm and the extended fingers – but no breaks in the bloody form, no creases or indentations that a bleeding hand pressed against hard wood would reveal, no identifying marks, no isolated parts of the flesh held in place so as to stamp its own particular characteristics. It was like a flat, coloured shadow from a piece of stained glass, no planes other than the single impression. A glove? A rubber glove?
David drew his eyes away and slowly turned to the staircase in the middle of the hallway, his thoughts haltingly centring on other words spoken by another man. A strange man with a mesmerizing voice.
Perhaps you should examine the note further…. It may all become clearer to you with help – psychiatric help.
Webb suddenly screamed, the terror within him growing as he ran to the staircase and raced up the steps to the bedroom, where he stared at the typewritten note on the bed. He picked it up with sickening fear and carried it to his wife’s dressing table. He turned on the lamp and studied the print under the light.
If the heart within him could have burst, it would have blown apart. Instead, Jason Bourne coldly examined the note before him.
The slightly bent, irregular rs were there, as well as the ds, the upper staves incomplete, breaking off at the halfway mark.
Bastards\
The note had been written on his own typewriter. Recruitment.
6
He sat on the rocks above the beach, knowing he had to think clearly. He had to define what was before him and what was expected of him and then how to out-think whoever was manipulating him. Above all, he knew he could not give in to panic, even the perception of panic – a panicked man was dangerous, a risk to be eliminated. If he went over the edge, he would only ensure the death of Marie and himself; it was that simple. Everything was so delicate – violently delicate.
David Webb was out of the question. Jason Bourne had to assume control. Jesus! It was crazy! Mo Panov had told him to walk on the beach – as Webb – and now he had to sit there as Bourne, thinking things out as Bourne would think them out – he had to deny one part of himself and accept the opposite.
Strangely, it was not impossible, nor even intolerable, for Marie was out there. His love, his only love – Don’t think that way. Jason Bourne spoke: she is a valuable possession taken from you! Get her back. Jason Bourne spoke. No, not a possession, my life!
Jason Bourne: Then break all the rules! Find her! Bring her back to you!
David Webb: / don’t know how. Help me!
Use me! Use what you’ve learned from me. You’ve got the tools, you’ve had them for years. You were the best in Medusa. Above all, there was control. You preached that. You lived that. And you stayed alive.
Control.
Such a simple word. Such an incredible demand.
Webb climbed off the rocks and once again went up the path through the wild grass to the street and started back towards the old Victorian house, loathing its sudden, frightening, unfair emptiness. As he walked a name flashed across his thoughts; then it returned and remained fixed. Slowly the face belonging to that name came into focus – very slowly, for the man aroused hatred in David that was no less acute for the sadness he also evoked.
Alexander Conklin had tried to kill him – twice – and each time he had nearly succeeded. And Alex Conklin – according to his deposition as well as his own numerous psychiatric sessions with Mo Panov and what vague memories David could provide – had been a close friend of Foreign Service Officer Webb and his Thai wife and their children in Cambodia a lifetime ago. When death had struck from the skies, filling the river with circles of blood, David had fled blindly to Saigon, his rage uncontrollable, and it was his friend in the Central Intelligence Agency, Alex Conklin, who found a place for him in the illegitimate battalion they called Medusa.
If you can survive the jungle training, you’ll be a man they want. But watch them – every goddamned one of them, every goddamned minute. They’ll cut your arm off for a watch. Those were the words Webb recalled, and he specifically recalled that they had been spoken by the voice of Alexander Conklin.
He had survived the brutal training and became Delta. No other name, just a progression in the alphabet. Delta One. Then after the war, Delta became Cain. Cain is for Delta and Carlos is for Cain. That was the challenge hurled at Carlos the assassin. Created by Treadstone 71, a killer named Cain would catch the Jackal.
It was as Cain, a name the underworld of Europe knew in reality was Asia’s Jason Bourne, that Conklin had betrayed his friend. A simple act of faith on Alex’s part could have made all the difference, but Alex could not find it within himself to provide it; his own bitterness precluded that particular charity. He believed the worst of his former friend because his own sense of martyrdom made him want to believe it. It raised his own broken self-esteem, convincing him that he was better than his former friend. In his work with Medusa, Conklin’s foot had been shattered by a land mine, and his brilliant career as a field strategist was cut short. A crippled man could not stay in the field where a growing reputation might take him up the ladders scaled by such men as Alien Dulles and James Angleton, and Conklin did not possess the skills for ‘the bureaucratic in-fighting demanded at Langley. He withered, a once extraordinary tactician left to watch inferior talents pass him by, his expertise sought only in secrecy, the head of Medusa always in the background, dangerous, someone to be kept at arm’s length.
Two years of imposed castration until a man known as the Monk – a Rasputin of covert operations – sought him out because one David Webb had been selected for an extraordinary assignment and Conklin had known Webb for years. Treadstone 71 was created, Jason Bourne became its product and Carlos the Jackal its target. And for thirty-two months Conklin monitored this most secret of classified operations, until the scenario fell apart with Jason Bourne’s disappearance and the withdrawal of over five million dollars from Treadstone’s Zurich account.
With no evidence to the contrary, Conklin presumed the worst. The legendary Bourne had turned; life in the nether world had become too much for him and the temptation to come in from the cold with over five million dollars had been too alluring to resist. Especially for one known as the chameleon, a multilingual deep-cover specialist who could change appearances and lifestyles with so little effort that he could literally vanish. A trap for an assassin had been baited and then the bait had vanished, revealing a scheming thief. For the crippled Alexander Conklin this was not only the act of a traitor, but intolerable treachery. Considering everything that had been done to him, his foot now no more than a painfully awkward dead weight surgically encased in stolen flesh, a once brilliant career a shambles, his personal life filled with a loneliness that only a total commitment to the Agency could bring about – a devotion not reciprocated what right had anyone else to turn? What other man had given what he had given?