“How about just plain guilty?” asked Panov.
“Too few at the top to warrant the destruction of the whole—that’s the verdict of Langley and Dzerzhinsky Square. The chief pin-stripers at the State Department in the Kremlin’s Council of Ministers agree. Nothing can be served by pursuing or exposing the extent of the malfeasance—how do you like that, malfeasance? Murder, assassination, kidnapping, extortion and large-scale corruption using organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic are now conveniently slotted as ‘malfeasance’! They say it’s better to salvage what we can as quietly and as expeditiously as possible.”
“That’s obscene.”
“That’s reality, Doctor. You’re about to witness one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history, certainly among powerful sovereign nations. … And the real obscenity is that they’re probably right. If Medusa were exposed to the fullest—and it would be fully exposed if it was exposed at all—the people in their righteous indignation would throw the bastards out—many of them the wrong bastards, tainted only by association. That sort of thing produces vacuums in high places, and these are not the times for vacuums of any kind. Better the Satans you know than the ones you don’t who come later.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“Trade off,” said Conklin pensively. “The scope of Medusa’s operations is so far-ranging geographically and structurally that it’s almost impossible to unravel. Moscow’s sending Ogilvie back with a team of financial analysts, and with our own people they’ll start the process of dismantling. Eventually Holland foresees a quiet, unannounced economic minisummit, calling together various financial ministers of the NATO and Eastern bloc countries. Wherever Medusa’s assets can be self-sustaining or absorbed by their individual economies, that’ll be the case with restrictive covenants on all parties. The main point is to prevent financial panics through mass factory closings and wholesale company collapses.”
“Thus burying Medusa,” offered Panov. “It’s again history, unwritten and unacknowledged, the way it was from the beginning.”
“Above all, that,” conceded Alex. “By omission and commission there’s enough sleaze to go around for everybody.”
“What about men like Burton on the Joint Chiefs, and Atkinson in London?”
“No more than messengers and fronts; they’re out for reasons of health, and believe me, they understand.”
Panov winced as he adjusted his uncomfortable wounded body in the chair. “It hardly compensates for his crimes, but the Jackal served a purpose of sorts, didn’t he? If you hadn’t been hunting him, you wouldn’t have found Medusa.”
“The coincidence of evil, Mo,” said Conklin. “I’m not about to recommend a posthumous medal.”
“I’d say it’s more than coincidence,” interrupted Panov, shaking his head. “In the final analysis, David was right. Whether forced or leaped upon, a connection was there after all. Someone in Medusa had a killer or killers using the name of ‘Jason Bourne’ assassinate a high-visibility target in the Jackal’s own backyard; that someone knew what he was doing.”
“You mean Teagarten, of course.”
“Yes. Since Bourne was on Medusa’s death list, our pathetic turncoat, DeSole, had to tell them about the Treadstone operation, perhaps not by name but its essentials. When they learned that Jason—David—was in Paris, they used the original scenario: Bourne against the Jackal. By killing Teagarten the way they did, they accurately assumed they were enlisting the most deadly partner they could find to hunt down and kill David.”
“We know that. So?”
“Don’t you see, Alex? When you think about it, Brussels was the beginning of the end, and at the end, David used that false accusation to tell Marie he was still alive, to tell Peter Holland that he was still alive. The map circling Anderlecht in red.”
“He gave hope, that’s all. Hope isn’t something I put much trust in, Mo.”
“He did more than give hope. That message made Holland prepare every station in Europe to expect Jason Bourne, assassin, and to use every extreme to get him back here.”
“It worked. Sometimes that kind of thing doesn’t.”
“It worked because weeks ago a man called Jason Bourne knew that to catch Carlos there had to be a link between himself and the Jackal, a long-forgotten connection that had to be brought to the surface. He did it, you did it!”
“In a hell of a roundabout way,” admitted Conklin. “We were reaching, that’s all. Possibilities, probabilities, abstractions—it’s all we had to work with.”
“Abstractions?” asked Panov gently. “That’s such an erroneously passive term. Have you any idea what thunder in the mind abstractions provoke?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Those gray cells, Alex. They go crazy, spinning around like infinitesimal Ping-Pong balls trying to find tiny tunnels to explode through, drawn by their own inherent compulsions.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You said it yourself, the coincidence of evil. But I’d suggest another conductor—the magnet of evil. That’s what you and David created, and within that magnetic field was Medusa.”
Conklin spun around in the chair and wheeled himself toward the balcony and the descending orange glow on the horizon beyond the deep-green out islands of Montserrat. “I wish everything was as simple as you put it, Mo,” he said rapidly. “I’m afraid it’s not.”
“You’ll have to be clearer.”
“Krupkin’s a dead man.”
“What?”
“I mourn him as a friend and one hell of an enemy. He made everything possible for us, and when it was all over, he did what was right, not what was ordered. He let David live and now he’s paying for it.”
“What happened to him?”
“According to Holland, he disappeared from the hospital in Moscow five days ago—he simply took his clothes and walked out. No one knows how he did it or where he went, but an hour after he left, the KGB came to arrest him and move him to the Lubyanka.”
“Then they haven’t caught him—”
“They will. When the Kremlin issues a Black Alert, every road, train station, airport and border crossing is put under a microscope. The incentives are irresistible: whoever lets him out will spend ten years in a gulag. It’s just a question of time. Goddamn it.”
There was a knock on the front door and Panov called out. “It’s open because it’s easier! Come in.”
The be-blazered, immaculately dressed assistant manager, Mr. Pritchard, entered, preceded by a room-service table that he was capable of pushing while standing completely erect. He smiled broadly and announced his presence as well as his mission. “Buckingham Pritchard at your service, gentlemen. I’ve brought a few delicacies from the sea for your collegial gathering before the evening meal which I have personally attended to at the side of the chef who has been known to be prone to errors without expert guidance which I was all too happy to provide.”
“Collegial?” said Alex. “I got out of college damn near thirty-five years ago.”
“It obviously didn’t take where the nuances of English are concerned,” mumbled Morris Panov. “Tell me, Mr. Pritchard, aren’t you terribly hot in those clothes? I’d be sweating like a pig.
“No nuances there, only an unproven cliché,” muttered Conklin.
“I do not perspire, sir,” replied the assistant manager.
“I’ll bet my pension you ‘perspired’ when Mr. St. Jacques came back from Washington,” offered Alex. “Christ almighty, Johnny a ‘terrorist’!”
“The incident has been forgotten, sir,” said Pritchard stoically. “Mr. Saint Jay and Sir Henry understand that my brilliant uncle and I had only the children’s interests at heart.”
“Savvy, very savvy,” observed Conklin.
“I’ll set up the canapés, gentlemen, and check the ice. The others should be here in a matter of minutes.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Panov.
David Webb leaned against the balcony archway watching his wife as she read the last pages of a children’s story to their son. The outstanding Mrs. Cooper was dozing in a chair, her magnificent black head, crowned by a fleece of silver and gray, kept nodding above her full chest as if she expected at any moment to hear sounds from the infant Alison beyond the half-closed door that was only feet from where she was sitting. The inflections of Marie’s quiet voice matched the words of the story, confirmed by Jamie’s wide eyes and parted lips. But for an analytical mind that found music in figures, his wife might have been an actress, mused David. She had the surface attributes of that precarious profession—striking features, a commanding presence, the sine qua non that forced both men and women to fall silent and pensively appraise her when she walked down a street or entered a room.
“You can read to me tomorrow, Daddy!”
The story was over, attested to by his son jumping off the couch and Mrs. Cooper flashing her eyes open. “I wanted to read that one tonight,” said Webb defensively, moving away from the arch.
“Well, you still kind of smell,” said the boy, frowning.
“Your father doesn’t smell, Jamie,” explained Marie, smiling. “I told you, it’s the medicine the doctor said he had to use on his injuries from the accident.”