“He’s gone, Marie. I don’t know what to say—you know how I felt about him.”
“Yes, I know, Johnny.” Then to St. Jacques’s astonishment, his sister looked up at him, a thin, wan smile appearing on her lips. “But it’s a little early for our tears, Bro. He’s alive.
Jason Bourne’s alive and up to his tricks and that means David’s alive, too.”
My God, she can’t accept it, thought the brother, walking to the couch and kneeling beside the coffee table in front of Marie, taking her hands in his. “Sis, honey, I don’t think you understand. I’ll do everything possible to help you, but you’ve got to understand.”
“Bro, you’re very sweet but you haven’t read this closely—really closely. The impact of the message detracts from the subtext. In economics we call it obfuscation with a cloud of smoke and a couple of mirrors.”
“Huh?” St. Jacques released her hands and stood up. “What are you talking about?”
Marie picked up the Langley communiqué and scanned it. “After several confused, even contradictory, accounts of what happened,” she said, “described by people on the scene at this armory, or whatever it is, the following is buried in the last paragraph. ‘Among the personal effects found on the slain assassin’s body was a map of Brussels and the surrounding area with the town of Anderlecht circled in red.’ Then it goes on to make the obvious connection with Teagarten’s assassination. It’s a wash, Johnny, from two points of view. … First, David would never carry such a map. Second, and far more telling, the fact that the Soviet media would give such prominence to the story is unbelievable enough, but to include the assassination of General Teagarten is simply too much.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“Because the presumed assassin was in Russia, and Moscow wants no conceivable linkage to the killing of a NATO commander. … No, Bro, someone bent the rules and persuaded Tass to put out the story, and I suspect heads will roll. I don’t know where Jason Bourne is, but I know he’s not dead. David made sure I’d know that.”
Peter Holland picked up the phone and touched the buttons on his console for Charles Casset’s private line.
“Yes?”
“Charlie, it’s Peter.”
“I’m relieved to hear that.”
“Why?”
“Because all I’m getting on this phone is trouble and confusion. I just got off with our source in Dzerzhinsky Square and he told me the KGB’s after blood.”
“The Tass release on Bourne?”
“Right. Tass and Radio Moscow assumed the story was officially sanctioned because it was faxed by the Ministry of Information using the proper immediate-release codes. When the shit hit the fan, no one owned up, and whoever programmed the codes can’t be traced.”
“What do you make of it?”
“I’m not sure, but from what I’ve learned about Dimitri Krupkin, it could be his style. He’s now working with Alex and if this isn’t something out of the Conklin textbook, I don’t know Saint Alex. And I do.”
“That dovetails with what Marie thinks.”
“Marie?”
“Bourne’s wife. I just spoke to her and her argument’s pretty strong. She says Moscow’s report is a wash for all the right reasons. Her husband’s alive.”
“I agree. Is that what you called to tell me?”
“No,” answered the director, taking a deep breath. “I’m adding to your trouble and confusion.”
“I’m not relieved to hear that. What is it?”
“The Paris telephone number, the link to the Jackal we got from Henry Sykes in Montserrat that reached a café on the Marais waterfront in Paris.”
“Where someone would answer a call for a blackbird. I remember.”
“Someone did and we followed him. You’re not going to like this.”
“Alex Conklin is about to earn the prick-of-the-year award. He put us on to Sykes, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Do tell.”
“The message was delivered to the home of the director of the Deuxième Bureau.”
“My God! We’d better turn that over to the SED branch of French intelligence with a restricted chronology.”
“I’m not turning anything over to anybody until we hear from Conklin. We owe him that much—I think.”
“What the hell are they doing?” shouted a frustrated Casset over the phone. “Putting out false death notices—from Moscow, no less! What for?”
“Jason Bourne’s gone hunting,” said Peter Holland. “And when the hunt is over—if it’s over and if the kill is made—he’s going to have to get out of the woods before anyone turns on him. … I want every station and listening post on the borders of the Soviet Union on full alert. Code name: Assassin. Get him back.”
40
Novgorod. To say it was incredible was to obliquely recognize the existence of credibility and that was nearly impossible. It was the ultimate fantasy, its optical illusions seemingly more real than reality, the phantasmagoria there to be touched, felt, used, entered into and departed from; it was a collective masterpiece of invention cut out of the immense forests along the Volkhov River. From the moment Bourne emerged from the deep underground tunnel below the water with its guards, gates and myriad cameras, he was as close to being in a state of shock while still being able to keep walking, observing, absorbing, thinking.
The American compound, presumably like those of the different countries, was broken up into sections, built on areas anywhere from two to five acres, each distinctly separate from the others. One area, erected on the banks of the river, might be the heart of a Maine waterfront village; another, farther inland, a small Southern town; yet another, a busy metropolitan city street. Each was completely “authentic” with the appropriate vehicular traffic, police, dress codes, shops, grocery and drug stores, gas stations and mock structures of buildings—many of which rose two stories high and were so real they had American hardware on the doors and windows. Obviously, as vital as the physical appearances was language—not merely the fluent use of English but the mastery of linguistic idiosyncrasies, the dialects that were characteristic of specific locations. As Jason wandered from one section to another he heard all around him the distinctive sounds. From New England Down East with its “eeahh” to Texas’s drawl and its familiar “you-alls”; from the gentle nasality of the Midwest to the loud abrasiveness of the large Eastern cities with the inevitable “know what I mean?” tacked on to conversational sentences, whether questions or statements. It was all incredible. It was not simply beyond belief, it made the true suspension of disbelief frighteningly viable.
He had been briefed on the flight from Vnokova by a late-middle-aged Novgorod graduate who had been urgently summoned from his Moscow apartment by Krupkin. The small, bald man was not only garrulously instructive, but in his own way mesmerizing. If anyone had ever told Jason Bourne that he was going to be briefed in depth by a Soviet espionage agent whose English was so laced with the Deep South that it sonorously floated out of his mouth with the essence of magnolias, he would have deemed the information preposterous.
“Good Lawd, Ah do miss those barbecues, especially the ribs. You know who grilled ’em best? That black fellow who I believed was such a good friend until he exposed me. Can you imagine? I thought he was one of those radicals. He turned out to be a boy from Dartmouth workin’ for the FBI. A lawyer, no less. … Hell, the exchange was made at Aeroflot in New York and we still write each other.”
“Adolescent games,” had mumbled Bourne.
“Games? … Oh yes, he was a mighty fine coach.”
“Coach?”
“Sure ’nuff. A few of us started a Little League in East Point. That’s right outside Atlanta.”
Incredible.
“May we concentrate on Novgorod, please?”
“Sutt’nly. Dimitri may have told you, I’m semi-retired, but my pension requires that I spend five days a month there as a tak govorya—a ‘trainer,’ as you would say.”
“I didn’t understand what he meant.”
“Ah’ll explain.” The strange man whose voice belonged to the old Confederacy had been thorough.
Each compound at Novgorod was divided into three classes of personnel: the trainers, the candidates and operations. The last category included the KGB staff, guards and maintenance. The practical implementation of the Novgorod process was simple in structure. A compound’s staff created the daily training schedules for each individual section, and the trainers, both permanent and part-time retirees, commandeered all individual and group activities while the candidates carried them out, using only the language of the compound and the dialects of the specific areas in which they were located. No Russian was permitted; the rule was tested frequently by the trainers who would suddenly bark orders or insults in the native language, which the candidates could not acknowledge understanding.
“When you say assignments,” Bourne had asked, “what do you mean?”
“Situations, mah friend. Jest about anything you might think of. Like ordering lunch or dinner, or buying clothes, or fillin’ the tank of your car, requesting a specific gasoline … leaded or unleaded and the degrees of octane—all of which we don’t know a thing about here. Then, of course, there are the more dramatic events often unscheduled so as to test the candidates’ reactions. Say, an automobile accident necessitating conversations with ‘American’ police and the resulting insurance forms that must be filled out—you can give yourself away if you appear too ignorant.”