The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum

“My God, David, don’t you understand? You’re marked! They’ll come after you themselves!”

“How can they? The hit man from Medusa who was there never saw my face except while I was running in shadows, and they have no idea who I am. I’m a nonperson who’ll simply disappear. … No, Marie, if Carlos shows up and if I can do what I know I can do in Montserrat, we’ll be free. To borrow a phrase, ‘free at last.’ ”

“Your voice changes; doesn’t it?”

“My what does which?”

“It really does. I can tell.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jason Bourne. “I’m being signaled. The plane’s here. Tell Johnny to keep those two old men under guard!”

The whispers spread through Montserrat like rolling pockets of mist. Something terrible had happened on the out island of Tranquility. … Bad times, mon.” … “The evil obeah come across the Antilles from Jamaic’ and there was death and madness.” … “And blood on the walls of death, mon, a curse put on the family of an animal.” … “Sshh! There was a cat mother and two cat children … !”

And there were other voices. … “Dear God, keep it quiet! It could ruin what tourism we’ve built!” … “Never anything like this before—an isolated incident, obviously drug related, brought over from another island! … “All too true, mon! I hear it was a madman, his body filled with dope.” … “I’m told a fast boat running like the wind of a hurricane took him out to sea. He’s gone! … Keep it quiet, I say! Remember the Virgins? The Fountainhead massacre? It took them years to recover. Quiet!”

And a single voice. “It’s a trap, sir, and if successful, as we believe it will be, we’ll be the talk of the West Indies, the heroes of the Caribbean. It’ll be positively mahvelous for our image. Law and order and all that.”

“Thank heavens! Was anyone actually killed?”

“One person, and she was in the act of taking another’s life.”

“She? Good God, I don’t want to hear another word until it’s all over.”

“It’s better that you not be available for comment.”

“Damned good idea. I’ll go out on the boat; the fish are running well after the storm.”

“Excellent, sir. And I’ll stay in radio contact with developments.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t. Anything can be picked up out there.”

“I only meant so as to advise you when to return—at the appropriate moment to make a most advantageous appearance. I’ll fill you in, of course.”

“Yes, of course. You’re a good man, Henry.”

“Thank you, Crown Governor.”

It was ten o’clock in the morning and they held each other fiercely, but there was no time for talk, only the brief comfort of being together, safe together, secure in the knowledge that they knew things the Jackal did not know and that knowledge gave them an enormous advantage. Still, it was only an advantage, not a guarantee, not where Carlos was concerned. And both Jason and John St. Jacques were adamant: Marie and the children were being flown south to Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre island. They would stay there with the Webbs’ regal maid, Mrs. Cooper, all under guard until they were called back to Montserrat. Marie objected, but her objections were met with silence; her husband’s orders were delivered abruptly, icily.

“You’re leaving because I have work to do. We won’t discuss it any further.”

“It’s Switzerland again … Zurich again, isn’t it, Jason?”

“It’s whatever you like,” replied Bourne, now preoccupied as the three of them stood at the base of the dock, two seaplanes bobbing in the water only yards apart at the far end. One had brought Jason directly to Tranquility from Antigua; the other was fueled for the flight to Guadeloupe with Mrs. Cooper and the children already inside. “Hurry up, Marie,” added Bourne. “I want to go over things with Johnny and then grill those two old scumballs.”

“They’re not scumballs, David. Because of them we’re alive.”

“Why? Because they blew it and had to turn to save their asses?”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s fair until I say otherwise, and they’re scum until they convince me they’re not. You don’t know the Jackal’s old men, I do. They’ll say anything, do anything, lie and snivel to hell and back, and if you turn the other way, they’ll shove a knife in your spine. He owns them—body, mind and what’s left of their souls. … Now get to the plane, it’s waiting.”

“Don’t you want to see the children, tell Jamie that—”

“No, there isn’t time! Take her out there, Johnny. I want to check the beach.”

“There’s nothing I haven’t checked, David,” said St. Jacques, his voice on the edge of defiance.

“I’ll tell you whether you have or not,” shot back Bourne, his eyes angry as he started across the sand, adding in a loud voice without looking around, “I’m going to have a dozen questions for you, and I hope to Christ you can answer them!”

St. Jacques tensed, taking a step forward but stopped by his sister. “Leave it alone, Bro,” said Marie, her hand on his arm. “He’s frightened.”

“He’s what? He’s one nasty son of a bitch is what he is!”

“Yes, I know.”

The brother looked at his sister. “That stranger you were talking about yesterday at the house?”

“Yes, only now it’s worse. That’s why he’s frightened.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s older, Johnny. He’s fifty now and he wonders if he can still do the things he did before, years ago—in the war, in Paris, in Hong Kong. It’s all gnawing at him, eating into him, because he knows he’s got to be better than he ever was.”

“I think he can be.”

“I know he will be, for he has an extraordinary reason going for him. A wife and two children were taken from him once before. He barely remembers them, but they’re at the core of his torment; Mo Panov believes that and I do, too. … Now, years later, another wife and two children are threatened. Every nerve in him has to be on fire.”

Suddenly, from three hundred feet away on the beach, Bourne’s voice erupted, splitting through the breezes from the sea. “Goddamn it, I told you to hurry! … And you, Mr. Expert, there’s a reef out here with the color of a sandbar beyond it! Have you considered that?”

“Don’t answer, Johnny. We’ll go out to the plane.”

“A sandbar? What the hell’s he talking about? … Oh, my God, I do see!”

“I don’t,” said Marie as they walked rapidly up the pier.

“There are reefs around eighty percent of the island, ninety-five percent where this beach is concerned. They brake the waves, it’s why it’s called Tranquility; there’s no surf at all.”

“So what?”

“So someone using a tank under water wouldn’t risk crashing into a reef, but he would into a sandbar in front of a reef. He could watch the beach and the guards and crawl up when his landing was clear, lying in the water only feet from shore until he could take the guard. I never thought about that.”

“He did, Bro.”

Bourne sat on the corner of the desk, the two old men on a couch in front of him, his brother-in-law standing by a window fronting the beach in the unoccupied villa.

“Why would I—why would we—lie to you, monsieur?” asked the hero of France.

“Because it all sounds like a classic French farce. Similar but different names; one door opening as another closes, look-alikes disappearing and entering on cue. It smells, gentlemen.”

“Perhaps you are a student of Molière or Racine … ?”

“I’m a student of uncanny coincidence, especially where the Jackal is concerned.”

“I don’t think there’s the slightest similarity in our appearances,” offered the judge from Boston. “Except, perhaps, our ages.”

The telephone rang. Jason quickly reached down and picked it up. “Yes?”

“Everything checks out in Boston,” said Conklin. “His name’s Prefontaine, Brendan Prefontaine. He was a federal judge of the first circuit caught in a government scam and convicted of felonious misconduct on the bench—read that as being very large in the bribery business. He was sentenced to twenty-one years and did ten, which was enough to blow him away in every department. He’s what they call a functioning alcoholic, something of a character in Bean Town’s shadier districts, but harmless—actually kind of liked in a warped sort of way. He’s also considered very bright when he’s clearheaded, and I’m told a lot of crumbs wouldn’t have gone court-free and others would be doing longer jail terms if he hadn’t given shrewd advice to their attorneys of record. You might say he’s a behind-the-scenes storefront lawyer, the ‘stores’ in his case being saloons, pool halls and probably warehouses…. Since I’ve been where he’s at in the booze terrain, he sounds straight arrow to me. He’s handling it better than I ever did.”