“My God!” yelled Panov. “Was that meant for one of us?”
“Maybe … maybe not,” replied the former intelligence officer breathlessly as sirens and whistles were heard in the distance.
“You said it was a trap!”
“Because we both got a crazy telegram from David using a name he hasn’t used in five years—Jason Bourne! And if I’m not mistaken, your message also said that under no condition should we call his house.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a trap. … You move better than I do, Mo, so move those legs of yours. Get out of here—run like a son of a bitch and find a telephone. A pay phone, nothing traceable!”
“What?”
“Call his house! Tell David to pack up Marie and the kids and get out of there!”
“What?”
“Someone found us, Doctor! Someone looking for Jason Bourne—who’s been looking for him for years and won’t stop until he’s got him in his gun sight. … You were in charge of David’s messed-up head, and I pulled every rotten string in Washington to get him and Marie out of Hong Kong alive. … The rules were broken and we were found, Mo. You and me! The only officially recorded connections to Jason Bourne, address and occupation unknown.”
“Do you know what you’re saying, Alex?”
“You’re goddamned right I do. … It’s Carlos. Carlos the Jackal. Get out of here, Doctor. Reach your former patient and tell him to disappear!”
“Then what’s he to do?”
“I don’t have many friends, certainly no one I trust, but you do. Give him the name of somebody—say, one of your medical buddies who gets urgent calls from his patients the way I used to call you. Tell David to reach him or her when he’s secure. Give him a code.”
“A code?”
“Jesus, Mo, use your head! An alias, a Jones or a Smith—”
“They’re rather common names—”
“Then Schicklgruber or Moskowitz, whatever you like! Just tell him to let us know where he is.”
“I understand.”
“Now get out of here, and don’t go home! … Take a room at the Brookshire in Baltimore under the name of—Morris, Phillip Morris. I’ll meet you there later.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Something I hate. … Without my cane I’m buying a ticket for this fucking roller coaster. Nobody’ll look for a cripple on one of these things. It scares the hell out of me, but it’s a logical exit even if I have to stay on the damn thing all night. … Now get out of here! Hurry!”
The station wagon raced south down a backcountry road through the hills of New Hampshire toward the Massachusetts border, the driver a long-framed man, his sharp-featured face intense, the muscles of his jaw pulsating, his clear light-blue eyes furious. Beside him sat his strikingly attractive wife, the reddish glow of her auburn hair heightened by the dashboard lights. In her arms was an infant, a baby girl of eight months; in the first backseat was another child, a blond-haired boy of five, asleep under a blanket, a portable guardrail protecting him from sudden stops. The father was David Webb, professor of Oriental studies, but once part of the notorious, unspoken-of Medusa, twice the legend that was Jason Bourne—assassin.
“We knew it had to happen,” said Marie St. Jacques Webb, Canadian by birth, economist by profession, savior of David Webb by accident. “It was merely a question of time.”
“It’s crazy!” David whispered so as not to wake the children, his intensity in no way diminished by his whisper. “Everything’s buried, maximum archive security and all the rest of that crap! How did anyone find Alex and Mo?”
“We don’t know, but Alex will start looking. There’s no one better than Alex, you said that yourself—”
“He’s marked now—he’s a dead man,” interrupted Webb grimly.
“That’s premature, David. ‘He’s the best there ever was,’ those were your words.”
“The only time he wasn’t was thirteen years ago in Paris.”
“Because you were better—”
“No! Because I didn’t know who I was, and he was operating on prior data that I didn’t know a damn thing about. He assumed it was me out there, but I didn’t know me, so I couldn’t act according to his script. … He’s still the best. He saved both our lives in Hong Kong.”
“Then you’re saying what I’m saying, aren’t you? We’re in good hands.”
“Alex’s, yes. Not Mo’s. That poor beautiful man is dead. They’ll take him and break him!”
“He’d go to his grave before giving anyone information about us.”
“He won’t have a choice. They’ll shoot him up to the moon with Amytals and his whole life will be on tape. Then they’ll kill him and come after me … after us, which is why you and the kids are heading south, way south. The Caribbean.”
“I’ll send them, darling. Not me.”
“Will you stop it! We agreed when Jamie was born. It’s why we got the place down there, why we damn near bought your kid brother’s soul to look after it for us. … Also, he’s done pretty damn well. We now own half interest in a flourishing inn down a dirt road on an island nobody ever heard of until that Canadian hustler landed therein a seaplane.”
“Johnny was always the aggressive type. Dad once said he could sell a broken-down heifer as a prime steer and no one would check the parts.”
“The point is he loves you … and the kids. I’m also counting on that wild man’s— Never mind, I trust Johnny.”
“While you’re trusting so much in my younger brother, don’t trust your sense of direction. You just passed the turn to the cabin.”
“Goddamn it!” cried Webb, braking the car and swerving around. “Tomorrow! You and Jamie and Alison are heading out of Logan Airport. To the island!”
“We’ll discuss it, David.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.” Webb breathed deeply, steadily, imposing a strange control. “I’ve been here before,” he said quietly.
Marie looked at her husband, his suddenly passive face outlined in the dim wash of the dashboard lights. What she saw frightened her far more than the specter of the Jackal. She was not looking at David Webb the soft-spoken scholar. She was staring at a man they both thought had disappeared from their lives forever.
2
Alexander Conklin gripped his cane as he limped into the conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. He stood facing a long impressive table, large enough to seat thirty people, but instead there were only three, the man at the head the gray-haired DCI, director of Central Intelligence. Neither he nor his two highest-ranking deputy directors appeared pleased to see Conklin. The greetings were perfunctory, and rather than taking his obviously assigned seat next to the CIA official on the DCI’s left, Conklin pulled out the chair at the far end of the table, sat down, and with a sharp noise slapped his cane against the edge.
“Now that we’ve said hello, can we cut the crap, gentlemen?”
“That’s hardly a courteous or an amiable way to begin, Mr. Conklin,” observed the director.
“Neither courtesy nor amiability is on my mind just now, sir. I just want to know why airtight Four Zero regulations were ignored and maximum-classified information was released that endangers a number of lives, including mine!”
“That’s outrageous, Alex!” interrupted one of the two associates..
“Totally inaccurate!” added the other. “It couldn’t happen and you know it!”
“I don’t know it and it did happen and I’ll tell you what’s outrageously accurate,” said Conklin angrily. “A man’s out there with a wife and two children, a man this country and a large part of the world owe more to than anyone could ever repay, and he’s running, hiding, frightened out of his mind that he and his family are targets. We gave that man our word, all of us, that no part of the official record would ever see the light of day until it was confirmed beyond doubt that Rich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, was dead. … All right, I’ve heard the same rumors you have, probably from the same or much better sources, that the Jackal was killed here or executed there, but no one—repeat no one—has come forward with indisputable proof. … Yet a part of that file was leaked, a very vital part, and it concerns me deeply because my name is there. … Mine and Dr. Morris Panov, the chief psychiatrist of record. We were the only—repeat only—two individuals acknowledged to have been close associates of the unknown man who assumed the name of Jason Bourne, considered in more sectors than we can count to be the rival of Carlos in the killing game. … But that information is buried in the vaults here in Langley. How did it get out? According to the rules, if anyone wants any part of that record—from the White House to the State Department to the holy Joint Chiefs—he has to go through the offices of the director and his chief analysts right here at Langley. They have to be briefed on all the details of the request, and even if they’re satisfied as to the legitimacy, there’s a final step. Me. Before a release is signed, I’m to be contacted, and in the event I’m not around any longer, Dr. Panov is to be reached, either one of us legally empowered to turn the request down flat. … That’s the way it is, gentlemen, and no one knows the rules better than I do because I’m the one who wrote them—again right here at Langley, because this was the place I knew best. After twenty-eight years in this corkscrew business, it was my final contribution—with the full authority of the president of the United States and the consent of Congress through the select committees on intelligence in the House and the Senate.”