The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum

“With more milk and sugar than I’m supposed to have. I’ll do it.”

“I still take it black,” said the director, moving away from the table and removing a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “My wife says the acid will kill me one day.”

“Other people say tobacco will.”

“What?”

“Look.” Alex pointed at the sign on the opposite wall. It read: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.

“That I’ve got enough clout for,” announced Holland quietly as he snapped his lighter and lit a cigarette.

Nearly twenty minutes passed. Every now and then one or the other of them picked up a magazine or a newspaper only to put it down moments later and look up at the inner door. Finally, twenty-eight minutes after he had disappeared with Panov, the doctor named Walsh reappeared.

“He tells me you know what he’s requesting and that you have no objections, Director Holland.”

“I’ve got plenty of objections, but it seems he’s overruled them. … Oh, excuse me, Doctor, this is Alex Conklin. He’s one of us and a close friend of Panov.”

“How do you feel, Mr. Conklin?” asked Walsh, nodding at Alex as he returned the greeting.

“I hate what he’s doing—what he wants to do—but he says it makes sense. If it does, it’s right for him and I understand why he insists on doing it. If it doesn’t make sense, I’ll pull him out of there myself, one foot and all. Does it make sense, Doctor? And what’s the risk of damage?”

“There’s always a risk where drugs are concerned, especially in terms of chemical balance, and he knows that. It’s why he’s designed an intravenous flow that prolongs his own psychological pain but somewhat reduces the potential damage.”

“Somewhat?” cried Alex.

“I’m being honest. So is he.”

“Bottom line, Doctor,” said Holland.

“If things go wrong, two or three months of therapy, not permanent.”

“And the sense?” insisted Conklin. “Does it make sense?”

“Yes,” replied Walsh. “What happened to him is not only recent, it’s consumed him. It’s obsessed his conscious, which can only mean that it’s inflamed his subconscious. He’s right. His unreachable recall is on the cutting edge. … I came in here as a courtesy. He’s insisted we proceed, and from what he’s told me, I’d do the same thing. Each of us would.”

“What’s the security?” asked Alex.

“The nurse will be dismissed and stay outside the door. There’ll be only a single battery-operated tape recorder and me … and one or both of you.” The doctor turned to the door, then glanced back. “I’ll send for you at the proper time,” he added, again disappearing inside.

Conklin and Peter Holland looked at each other. The second period of waiting began.

To their astonishment, it ended barely ten minutes later. A nurse came out into the lounge and asked them to follow her. They walked through what appeared to be a maze of antiseptic white walls broken up only by recessed white panels with glass knobs that denoted doors. Only once on their brief journey did they see another human being; it was a man in a white smock, wearing a white surgical mask, who walked out of yet another white door, his sharp, intense eyes above the white cloth somehow accusing, determining them to be aliens from some different world that had not been cleared for Sterile House Five.

The nurse opened a door; there was a blinking red light above its top frame. She put her index finger to her lips, indicating silence. Holland and Conklin walked quietly inside a dark room and confronted a drawn white curtain concealing a bed or an examining table beyond, a small circle of intense light shining through the cloth. They heard the softly spoken words of Dr. Walsh.

“You are going back, Doctor, not far back, just a day or so, just when you began to feel the dull, constant pain in your arm … your arm, Doctor. Why are they inflicting pain on your arm? You were in a farmhouse, a small farmhouse with fields outside your window, and then they put a blindfold on you and began hurting your arm. Your arm, Doctor.”

Suddenly, there was a muted flashing of green light reflected on the ceiling. The curtain parted electronically several feet, revealing the bed, the patient and the doctor. Walsh took his finger off a bedside button and looked at them, gesturing slowly with his hands as if to say, There’s no one else here. Confirmed?

Both witnesses nodded, at first mesmerized, then repelled at the sight of Panov’s grimacing pale face and the tears that began to flow from his wide-open eyes. Then, as one, they saw the white straps that emerged from under the white sheet, holding Mo in place; the order had to be his.

“The arm, Doctor. We have to begin with the physically invasive procedure, don’t we? Because you know what it does, Doctor, don’t you? It leads to another invasive procedure that you cannot permit. You must stop its progression.”

The ear-shattering scream was a prolonged shriek of defiance and horror. “No, no! I won’t tell you! I killed him once, I won’t kill him again! Get away from meeeee … !”

Alex slumped, falling to the floor. Peter Holland grabbed him and gently the strong, broad-shouldered admiral, a veteran of the darkest operations in the Far East, led Conklin silently through the door to the nurse. “Get him away from here, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Peter,” coughed Alex, trying to stand, collapsing on his false foot. “I’m sorry, Christ, I’m sorry!”

“What for?” whispered Holland.

“I should watch but I can’t watch!”

“I understand. It’s all too close. If I were you, I probably couldn’t either.”

“No, you don’t understand! Mo said he killed David, but of course he didn’t. But I meant to, I really wanted to kill him! I was wrong, but I tried with all the expertise in my bones to kill him! And now I’ve done it again. I sent him to Paris. … It’s not Mo, it’s me!”

“Put him against the wall, miss. Let him sink to the floor and leave us alone.”

“Yes, sir!” The nurse did as she was ordered and fled, leaving Holland and Alex alone in the antiseptic maze.

“Now, you listen to me, Field Man,” whispered the gray-haired director of the Central Intelligence Agency, kneeling in front of Conklin. “This fucking merry-go-round of guilt had better stop—has got to stop—or nobody’s going to be any good to anybody. I don’t give a good goddamn what you or Panov did thirteen years ago, or five years ago, or now! We’re all reasonably bright people, and we did what each of us did because we thought they were the right moves at the time. … Guess what, Saint Alex? Yes, I’ve heard the term. We make mistakes. Fucking inconvenient, isn’t it? Maybe we’re not so brilliant after all. Maybe Panov isn’t the greatest behavioral whatever-the-hell-it-is; maybe you’re not the shrewdest son of a bitch in the field, the one who got canonized, and maybe I’m not the superjock behind-the-lines strategist they’ve made me out to be. So what? We take our baggage and go where we have to go.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up!” yelled Conklin, struggling against the wall.

“Shhh!”

“Oh, shit! The last thing I need is a sermon from you! If I had a foot, I’d take you.”

“Now we’re physical?”

“I was Black Belt. First class, Admiral.”

“Golly, gee. I don’t even know how to wrestle.”

Their eyes met and Alex was the first to laugh quietly. “You’re too much, Peter. I got your message. Help me up, will you? I’ll go back to the lounge and wait for you. Come on, give me a hand.”

“The hell I will,” said Holland, getting to his feet and standing over Conklin. “Help yourself. Someone told me that the Saint made it back through a hundred and forty miles in enemy territory, through rivers and streams and jungle, and arrived at the Foxtrot base camp asking if anybody had a bottle of bourbon.”

“Yeah, well, that was different. I was a hell of a lot younger and I had another foot.”

“Pretend you got one now, Saint Alex.” Holland winked. “I’m going back inside. One of us has to be there.”

“Bastard!”

For an hour and forty-seven minutes Conklin sat in the lounge. His attachable footless foot never throbbed, but it was throbbing now. He did not know what the impossible feeling meant, but he could not dismiss the beat that surged through his leg. If nothing else, it was something to think about, and he thought wistfully of the younger days, when he had both feet, and before. Oh, how he had wanted to change the world! And how he had felt so right in a destiny that forced him to become the youngest valedictorian in his high school’s history, the youngest freshman ever accepted at Georgetown, a bright, bright light that shimmered at the end of the tunnels of academe. His decline started when someone, somewhere, found out that his name at birth was not Alexander Conklin but Aleksei Nikolae Konsolikov. That now faceless man had casually asked him a question, the answer to which had changed Conklin’s life.