Conklin looked at the screen, at the date of Swayne’s last entry referring to R.G. It was on August second, barely a week ago. He picked up the leather-bound diary and turned to the day. He had been concentrating on names, not comments, unless the information struck him as relevant—to what he was not sure, but he was trusting to instinct. If he had known up front who R.G. was, the abbreviated handwritten notation beside the last entry would have caught his eye.
RG will nt cnsider app’t fr Maj. Crft. Need Crft on hs stff. Unlock. Paris—7 yrs ago. Two file out and bur’d.
The Paris should have alerted him, thought Alex, but Swayne’s notes throughout were filled with foreign or exotic names and places as if the general had been trying to impress whoever might read his personal observations. Also, Conklin regretfully considered, he was terribly tired; were it not for his computer he probably would not have centered in on Dr. Randolph Gates, legal Olympian.
Paris—7 yrs ago. Two file out and bur’d.
The first part was obvious, the second obscure but hardly concealed. The “Two” referred to the army’s intelligence arm, G-2, and the “file” was just that, an event or a revelation uncovered by intelligence personnel in Paris—7 yrs ago and removed from the data banks. It was an amateur’s attempt to use intelligence gibberish by misusing it. “Unlock” meant “key”—Jesus, Swayne was an idiot! Using his notepad, Alex wrote out the notation as he knew it to be:
“Randolph Gates will not consider the appointment for a Major Craft or Croft or even Christopher, for the f could be an s. (But) we need Crft on his staff. The key is to use the information in our G-2 file about Gates in Paris seven years ago, said file removed and in our possession.”
If that was not the exact translation of Swayne’s insertion, it was certainly close enough in substance to act upon, mused Conklin, turning his wrist and glancing at his watch. It was twenty past three in the morning, a time when even the most disciplined person would be shaken by the shrill bell of a telephone. Why not? David—Jason—was right. Every hour counted now. Alex picked up the phone and touched the numbers for Boston, Massachusetts.
The telephone kept ringing and the bitch would not pick it up in her room! Then Gates looked at the lighted square and the blood drained from his head. It was his unlisted number, a number that was restricted to a very few. He thrashed wildly in the bed, his eyes wide; the strange call from Paris unnerved him the more he thought about it. It concerned Montserrat, he knew it! The information he had relayed was wrong. … Prefontaine had lied to him and now Paris wanted an accounting! My God, they’d come after him, expose him! … No, there was a way, a perfectly acceptable explanation, the truth. He would deliver the liars to Paris, to Paris’s man here in Boston. He would trap the drunken Prefontaine and the sleazeball detective and force them to tell their lies to the one person who could absolve him. … The phone! He had to answer it. He could not appear as if he had anything to hide! He reached out and grabbed the incessantly ringing instrument, pulling it to his ear. “Yes?”
“Seven years ago, Counselor,” began the quiet voice on the line. “Do I have to remind you that we’ve got the entire file. The Deuxième Bureau was extremely cooperative, far more than you have been.”
“For God’s sake, I was lied to!” cried Gates, swinging his legs onto the floor in panic, his voice hoarse. “You can’t believe I’d forward erroneous information. I’d have to be insane!”
“We know you can be obstinate. We made a simple request—”
“I complied, I swear I did! Good Christ, I paid fifteen thousand dollars to make certain everything was silent, absolutely untraceable—not that the money matters, of course—”
“You paid … ?” interrupted the quiet voice.
“I can show you the bank withdrawals!”
“For what?”
“The information, naturally. I hired a former judge who has contacts—”
“For information about Craft?”
“What?”
“Croft. … Christopher.”
“Who?”
“Our major, Counselor. The major.”
“If that’s her code name, then yes, yes I did!”
“A code name?”
“The woman. The two children. They flew to the island of Montserrat. I swear that’s what I was told!”
There was a sudden click and the line went dead.
13
His hand still on the telephone, Conklin broke out in a sweat. He released the phone and got up from his chair, limping away from the computer, looking back at it, down at it, as if it were some monstrous thing that had taken him into a forbidden land where nothing was as it appeared to be or should be. What had happened? How did Randolph Gates know anything about Montserrat, about Marie and the children? Why?
Alex lowered himself into the armchair, his pulse racing, his thoughts clashing, no judgments emerging, only chaos. He gripped his right wrist with his left hand, his nails digging into his flesh. He had to get hold of himself, he had to think—he had to act! For David’s wife and children.
Associations. What were the conceivable associations? It was difficult enough to consider Gates as even unwittingly a part of Medusa, but impossible to think he was also connected to Carlos the Jackal. Impossible! … Yet both appeared to be; the connections existed. Was Carlos himself part of Swayne’s Medusa? Everything they knew about the Jackal would deny it emphatically. The assassin’s strength was in his total disassociation with any structured entity, Jason Bourne had proved that thirteen years ago in Paris. No group of people could ever reach him; they could only send out a message and he would reach them. The single organization the international killer for hire permitted was his army of old men, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, lost misfits, criminals whose impoverished last days were made better by the assassin’s largess, fealty unto death demanded and received. Where did—could—a man like Randolph Gates fit in?
He didn’t, concluded Alex as the outer limits of his imagination explored an old territory—Be skeptical of the apparent. The celebrated attorney was no more part of Carlos than he was of Medusa. He was the aberration, the flaw in the lens, an otherwise honorable man with a single weakness that had been uncovered by two disparate parties both with extraordinary resources. It was common knowledge that the Jackal could reach into the Sûreté and Interpol, and it took no clairvoyance to assume that Medusa could penetrate the army’s G-2. It was the only possible explanation, for Gates had been too controversial, too powerful for too long to function as spectacularly as he did in the courts if his vulnerability was easily uncovered. No, it would take predators like the Jackal and the men of Medusa to bore deep enough to dredge up a secret so devastating as to turn Randolph Gates into a valuable pawn. Clearly, Carlos had gotten to him first.
Conklin reflected on a truth that was forever reconfirmed: the world of global corrupters was in reality a small multilayered neighborhood, geometric in design, the irregular avenues of corruption leading into one another. How could it be otherwise? The residents of those lethal streets had services to offer, their clients were a specific breed—the desperate dregs of humanity. Extort, compromise, kill. The Jackal and the men of Medusa belonged to the same fraternal order. The Brotherhood of I Must Have Mine.
Breakthrough. But it was a breakthrough Jason Bourne could handle—not David Webb—and Webb was still too much a part of Bourne. Especially since both parts of the same man were over a thousand miles away from Montserrat, the coordinates of death determined by Carlos. Montserrat? … Johnny St. Jacques! The “little brother” who had proved himself in a backwater town in the northern regions of Canada, proved himself beyond the knowledge and the understanding of his family, especially his beloved sister. A man who could kill in anger—who had killed in fury—and who would kill again if the sister he adored and her children were under the Jackal’s gun. David believed in him—Jason Bourne believed in him, which was far more to the point.
Alex looked over at the telephone console, then quickly got out of the chair. He rushed to the desk, sat down, and touched the buttons that rewound the current tape, adjusting it to the spot where he wanted to pick it up. He went forward and back until he heard Gates’s panicked voice.
“… Good Christ, I paid fifteen thousand—”
No, not there, thought Conklin. Later.
“… I can show you the bank withdrawals—”
Later!
“… I hired a former judge who has contacts—”
That’s it. A judge.
“… They flew to the island of Montserrat—”
Alex opened the drawer where he kept a sheet of paper with each number he had called during the past two days on the assumption that he might need specific ones quickly. He saw the number in the Caribbean for Tranquility Inn, picked up the phone and dialed. After more rings than seemed necessary, a voice thick with sleep answered.