“That was the premise, yes,” agreed Conklin, nodding. “It’s why I dug around and made those phone calls, never expecting to find what I did. Jesus, a global cartel born twenty years ago in Saigon, peopled by some of the biggest fish in and out of the government and the military. It was the kind of pay dirt I didn’t want and wasn’t looking for. I thought I might dig up maybe ten or twelve hotshot millionaires with post-Saigon bank accounts that couldn’t bear scrutiny, but not this, not this Medusa.”
“To put it as simply as possible,” continued Holland, frowning, his eyes again straying down to the papers in front of him, then up at Alex. “Once the connection was made between Medusa and Carlos, word would be passed to the Jackal that there was a man Medusa wanted eliminated, and cost was no object. So far, yes?”
“The key here was the caliber and the status of those reaching Carlos,” explained Conklin. “They had to be as close to bona fide Olympians as we could find, the kind of clients the Jackal doesn’t get and never got.”
“Then the name of the target is revealed—say, in a way such as ‘John Smith, once known years ago as Jason Bourne’—and the Jackal is hooked. Bourne, the one man he wants dead above all others.”
“Yes. That’s why the Medusans reaching Carlos had to be so solid, so above questioning that Carlos accepts them and dismisses any sort of a trap.”
“Because,” added the CIA’s director, “Jason Bourne came out of Saigon’s Medusa—a fact known to Carlos—but he never shared in the riches of the later, postwar Medusa. That’s the background scenario, isn’t it?”
“The logic’s as clean as it can be. For three years he was used and damn near killed in a black operation, and along the way he supposedly discovered that more than a few undistinguished Saigon pricks were driving Jaguars and were sailing yachts and pulling down six-figure retainers while he went on a government pension. That could try the patience of John the Baptist, to say nothing of Barabbas.”
“It’s a terrific libretto,” allowed Holland, a slow smile breaking across his face. “I can hear the tenors soaring in triumph and the Machiavellian bassos slinking offstage in defeat. … Don’t scowl at me, Alex, I mean it! It’s really ingenious. It’s so inevitable it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your Bourne was right from the beginning. It all took place the way he saw it, but not in any way he could have imagined. Because it was inevitable; somewhere there had to be a cross-pollinator.”
“Please come down from Mars and explain to an earthling, Peter.”
“Medusa’s using the Jackal! Now. Teagarten’s assassination proves it unless you want to concede that Bourne actually blew up that car outside of Brussels.”
“Of course not.”
“Then Carlos’s name had to surface for someone in Medusa who already knew about Jason Bourne. It couldn’t be otherwise. You didn’t mention either one to Armbruster, or Swayne, or Atkinson in London, did you?”
“Again, of course not. The time wasn’t right; we weren’t ready to pull those triggers.”
“Who’s left?” asked Holland.
Alex stared at the DCI. “Good Lord,” he said softly. “DeSole?”
“Yes, DeSole, the grossly underpaid specialist who complained amusingly but incessantly that there was no way a man could properly educate his children and grandchildren on government pay. He was brought in on everything we discussed, starting with your assault on us in the conference room.”
“He certainly was, but that was limited to Bourne and the Jackal. There was no mention of Armbruster or Swayne, no Teagarten or Atkinson—the new Medusa wasn’t even in the picture. Hell, Peter, you didn’t know about it until seventy-two hours ago.”
“Yes, but DeSole did because he’d sold out; he was part of it. He had to have been alerted. ‘… Watch it. We’ve been penetrated. Some maniac says he’s going to expose us, blow us apart.’ … You told me yourself that panic buttons were punched from the Trade Commission to Pentagon Procurements to the embassy in London.”
“They were punched,” agreed Conklin. “So hard that two of them had to be taken out along with Teagarten and our disgruntled Mole. Snake Lady’s elders quickly decided who their vulnerable people were. But where does Carlos or Bourne fit in? There’s no attribution.”
“I thought we agreed that there was.”
“DeSole?” Conklin shook his head. “It’s a provocative thought, but it doesn’t wash. He couldn’t have presumed that I knew about Medusa’s penetration because we hadn’t even started it.”
“But when you did, the sequence had to bother him if only in the sense that although they were poles apart, one crisis followed too quickly upon another. What was it? A matter of hours?”
“Less than twenty-four … Still, they were poles apart.”
“Not for an analyst’s analyst,” countered Holland. “If it walks like an odd duck and sounds like an odd duck, look for an odd duck. I submit that somewhere along the line DeSole made the connection between Jason Bourne and the madman who had infiltrated Medusa—the new Medusa.”
“For Christ’s sake, how?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you told us Bourne came out of the old Saigon Medusa—that’s one hell of a connection to begin with.”
“My God, you may be right,” said Alex, falling back on the couch. “The driving force we gave our unnamed madman was that he’d been cut off from, the new Medusa. I used the words myself with every phone call. ‘He’s spent years putting it together. …’ ‘He’s got names and ranks and banks in Zurich. …’Jesus, I’m blind! I said those things to total strangers on a telephone fishing expedition and never even thought about having mentioned Bourne’s origins in Medusa at that meeting when DeSole was here.”
“Why should you have thought about it? You and your man decided to play a separate game all by yourselves.”
“The reasons were goddamned valid,” broke in Conklin. “For all I knew, you were a Medusan.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“Come on, don’t give me that shit. ‘We’ve got a top max out at Langley’ … those were the words I heard from London. What would you have thought, what would you have done?”
“Exactly what you did,” answered Holland, a tight grin on his lips. “But you’re supposed to be so bright, so much smarter than I’m supposed to be.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself; you did what any of us would have done in your place.”
“For that I do thank you. And you’re right, of course. It had to be DeSole; how he did it, I don’t know, but it had to be him. It probably went back years inside his head—he never really forgot anything, you know. His mind was a sponge that absorbed everything and never let a recollection drip away. He could remember words and phrases, even spontaneous grunts of approval or disapproval the rest of us forgot. … And I gave him the whole Bourne-Jackal history—and then someone from Medusa used it in Brussels.”
“They did more than that, Alex,” said Holland, leaning forward in his chair and picking up several papers from his desk. “They stole your scenario, usurped your strategy. They’ve pitted Jason Bourne against Carlos the Jackal, but instead of the controls being in your hands, Medusa has them. Bourne’s back where he was in Europe thirteen years ago, maybe with his wife, maybe not, the only difference being that in addition to Carlos and Interpol and every other police authority on the continent ready to waste him on sight, he’s got another lethal monkey on his back.”
“That’s what’s in those pages you’re holding, isn’t it? The information from New York?”
“I can’t guarantee it, but I think so. It’s the cross-pollinator I spoke about before, the bee that went from one rotten flower to another carrying poison.”
“Deliver, please.”
“Nicolo Dellacroce and the higher-ups above him.”
“Mafia?”
“It’s consistent, if not socially acceptable. Medusa grew out of Saigon’s officer corps and it still relegates its dirty work to the hungry grunts and corrupt NCOs. Check out Nicky D. and men like Sergeant Flannagan. When it comes to killing or kidnapping or using drugs on prisoners, the starched-shirt boys stay far in the background; they’re nowhere to be found.”
“But I gather you found them,” said the impatient Conklin.
“Again, we think so—we being our people in quiet consultation with New York’s anticrime division, especially a unit called the U.S. platoon.”
“Never heard of it.”
“They’re mostly Italian Americans; they gave themselves the name Untouchable Sicilians. Thus the U.S. initials with a dual connotation.”
“Nice touch.”
“Unnice work. … According to the Reco-Metropolitan’s billing files—”
“The who?”
“The company that installed the answering machine on One Hundred Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“According to the files, the machine was leased to a small importing firm on Eleventh Avenue several blocks from the piers. An hour ago we got the telephone records for the past two months for the company, and guess what we found?”