‘What’s your beef?’
‘My beef] My goddamned life, soldier. Something’s going on and I want to know what it is! That son of a bitch broke into my apartment last night and threatened to kill me. He made some pretty wild accusations naming men on your payroll like Harry Babcock, Samuel Teasdale and William Lanier. We checked; they’re in your covert division and still practising. What the hell did they do? One made it plain you’d send out an execution team after him! What kind of language is that? Another told him to go back to a hospital – he’s been in two hospitals and our combined, very private clinic in Virginia – we all put him there, and he’s got a clean bill! He’s also got some secrets in his head none of us wants out. But that man is ready to explode because of something you idiots did, or let happen, or closed your fucking eyes to! He claims to have proof that you walked back into his life and turned it around, that you set him up and took a hell of a lot more than a pound of flesh!’
‘What proof?’ asked the stunned general.
‘He spoke to his wife,’ said Conklin in a sudden monotone.
‘So?’
‘She was taken from their home by two men who sedated her and put her on a private jet. She was flown to the West Coast. ‘
‘You mean she was kidnapped?
‘You’ve got it. And what should make you swallow hard is that she overheard the two of them talking to the pilot, and gathered that the whole dirty business had something to do with the State Department – for reasons unknown – but the name McAllister was mentioned. For your enlightenment he’s one of your undersecretaries from the Fast East Section. ‘
This is nuts!’
‘I’ll tell you what’s more than nuts – mine and yours in a crushed salad. She got away during a refuelling stop in San Francisco. That’s when she reached Webb back in Maine. He’s on his way to meet her – God knows where – but you’d better have some solid answers, unless you can establish the fact that he’s a lunatic who may have killed his wife – which I hope you can – and that there was no abduction – which I sincerely hope there wasn’t. ‘
‘He’s certifiable? cried the Chief of State’s Internal Security. ‘I read those logs! I had to – someone else called about this Webb last night. Don’t ask me who. I can’t tell you. ‘
‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded Conklin, leaning across the desk, his hands on the edge, as much for support as for effect.
‘He’s paranoid. What can I say? He makes things up and believes them!’
‘That’s not what the Government doctors determined,’ said Conklin icily. ‘I happen to know something about that. ‘
‘I don’t, damn it!’
‘You probably never will,’ agreed Alex. ‘But as a surviving member of the Treadstone operation, I want you to reach someone who can say the right words and put my mind at ease. Somebody over here has opened up a can of worms we intend to keep a tight lid on.’ Conklin took out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen; he wrote down a number, tore off the page and dropped it on the desk. That’s a sterile phone; a trace would only give you a false address.’ His eyes were hard, his voice firm, the slight tremble even ominous. ‘It’s to be used between three and four this afternoon, no other time. Have someone reach me then. I don’t care who it is or how you do it. Maybe you’ll have to call one of your celebrated policy conferences, but I want answers – we want answers!’
‘You could be all wet, you know!’
‘I hope I am. But if I’m not, you people over here are going to get strung up – hard – because you’ve crossed over into off-limits territory. ‘
David was grateful that there were so many things to do, for
without them he might plummet into a mental limbo and become paralysed by the strain of knowing both too much and too little. After Conklin left for Langley, he had returned to the hotel and started his inevitable list. Lists calmed him; they were preliminaries to necessary activity and forced him to concentrate on specific items rather than on the reasons for selecting them. Brooding over the reasons would cripple his mind as severely as a land mine had crippled Conklin’s right foot. He could not think about Alex either – there were too many possibilities and impossibilities. Nor could he phone his once and former enemy. Conklin was thorough; he was the best. The ex-strategist projected each action and its subsequent reaction, and his first determination was that within minutes of his call to the State Department’s Chief of Internal Security, other telephones would be used, and two specific phones undoubtedly tapped. Both his. In his apartment and at Langley. Therefore to avoid any interruptions or interceptions he did not intend to return to his office. He would meet David at the airport later, 30 minutes before Webb’s flight to Hong Kong.
‘You think you got here without someone following you?’ he had said to Webb. ‘I’m not certain of that. They’re programming you and when someone punches a keyboard he keeps his eye on the constant number. ‘
‘Will you please speak English? Or Mandarin? I can handle those but not that horseshit. ‘
‘They could have a microphone under your bed. I trust you’re ‘not a closet something-or-other. ‘
There would be no contact until they met at the lounge at Dulles Airport, which was why David now stood at a cashier’s counter in a luggage store on Wyoming Avenue. He was buying an outsized flight bag to replace his suitcase; he had discarded much of his clothing. Things – precautions -were coming back to him, among them the unwarranted risk of waiting in an airport’s luggage area, and since he wanted the greater anonymity of economy class, a carry-on two-suiter might be disallowed. He would buy whatever he needed wherever he was, and that meant he had to have a great deal of money for any number of contingencies. This fact determined his next stop, a bank on 14th Street.
A year before, while the Government probers were examining what was left of his memory, Marie had quietly, rapidly, withdrawn the funds David had left in Zurich’s Gemeinschaft Bank as well as those he had transferred to Paris as Jason Bourne. She had wired the money to the Cayman Islands, where she knew a Canadian banker, and established an appropriately confidential account. Considering what Washington had done to her husband – the damage to his mind, the physical suffering and near loss of life because men refused to hear his tries for help – she was letting the Government off lightly. If David had decided to sue, and in spite of everything, it was not out of the question, any astute attorney would go into court seeking damages upwards of $10 million, not roughly five-plus.
She had speculated aloud about her thoughts on legal redress with an extremely nervous deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She did not discuss the missing funds other than to say that with her financial training she was appalled to learn that so little protection had been given the American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. She had delivered this criticism in a shocked if gentle voice, but her eyes were saying something else. The lady was a highly intelligent, highly motivated tiger, and her message got through. So wiser and more cautious men saw the logic of her speculations and let the matter drop. The funds were buried under top-secret, eyes-only contingency appropriations.
Whenever additional money was needed – a trip, a car, the house – Marie or David would call their banker in the Caymans and he would credit the funds by wire to any of five dozen reciprocating banks in Europe, the United States, the Pacific Islands and the Far East.
From a pay phone on Wyoming Avenue, Webb placed a collect call, mildly astonishing his friendly banker by the amount of money he needed immediately and the funds he wanted available in Hong Kong. The collect call came to less than $8.00, the money to over half a million dollars.
‘I assume that my dear friend, the wise and glorious Marie, approves, David?’
‘She told me to call you. She said she can’t be bothered with trifles. ‘
‘How like her! The banks you will use are… ‘
Webb walked through the thick glass doors of the bank on 14th Street, spent twenty irritating minutes with a vice-president who tried too hard to be an instant chum, and walked out with $50, 000, forty in $500 bills, the rest a mix.
He then hailed a cab and was driven to an apartment in DC North West, where lived a man he had known in his days as Jason Bourne, a man who had done extraordinary work for the State Department’s Treadstone 71. The man was a silver-haired Black who had been a taxi driver until one day a passenger left a Hasselblad camera in his car and never put in a claim. That was years ago and for several years the cabbie had experimented, and had found his true vocation. Quite simply, he was a genius at ‘alteration’ – his speciality being passports and drivers’ licences with photographs and I. D. cards for those who had come in conflict with the law, in the main with felony arrests. David had not remembered the man, but under Panov’s hypnosis he had said the name -improbably it was Cactus – and Mo had brought the photographer to Virginia to help jar a part of Webb’s memory. There had been warmth and concern in the old black man’s eyes on his first visit, and although it was an inconvenience, he had requested permission from Panov to visit David once a week.