Robert Ludlum - Bourne 2 - Bourne Supremecy

by The Bourne Supremacy [lit]

  'Where-T McAllister took a step towards the CIA man.

  'A little bird, Cock Robin,' said Conklin.

  'A red-headed cardinal, I presume,' said the diplomat. ,

  'Actually, not any more,' replied Alex.

  'I see.' Havilland unclasped his hands, lowering his arms on the desk. 'He knows who you are, too.'

  'He should. He was part of the detail at the Kowloon station.'

  'He told me to congratulate you, to tell you that your Olympian outraced them. He got away.'

  'He's sharp.'

  'He knows where to find him but won't waste the time.'

  'Sharper still. Waste is waste. He told you something else, too, and since I overheard your flattering assessment of my past, would you care to tell me what it was?

  Then you'll listen to me?

  'Or be carried out in a box? Or boxes? Where's the option?

  'Yes, quite true,' said the diplomat. 'I'd have to go through with it, you know.'

  'I know you know, Hen General?

  That's offensive.'

  'So are you. What did the major tell you?

  'A terrorist Tong from Macao telephoned the South China

  News Agency claiming responsibility for the killings. Only they said the woman was incidental, the driver was the target. As a native member of the hated British secret security arm, he had shot to death one of their leaders on the Wanchai waterfront two weeks ago. The information was correct. He was the protection we assigned to Catherine Staples.'

  'It's a lie!' shouted Conklin. 'She was the target!'

  'Lin says it's a waste of time to pursue a false source.'

  Then he knows?'

  That we've been penetrated?'

  'What the hell else!' said the exasperated CIA man.

  'He's a proud Zhongguo ren and has a brilliant mind. He doesn't like failure in any form, especially now. I suspect he's started his hunt... Sit down, Mr Conklin. We have things to talk about.'

  'I don't believe this!' cried McAllister in a deeply personal whisper. 'You talk of killings, of targets, of "beyond-salvage"... of a mocked-up suicide - the victim here, talking about his own death - as if you were discussing the Dow-Jones or a restaurant menu! What kind of people are you?'

  'I've told you, Mr Undersecretary,' said Havilland gently. 'Men who do what others won't, or can't, or shouldn't. There's no mystique, no diabolical universities where we were trained, no driving compulsion to destroy. We drifted into these areas because there were voids to fill and the candidates were few. It's all rather accidental, I suppose. And with repetition you either find that you do or you don't have the stomach for it - because somebody has to. Would you agree, Mr Conklin?'

  This is a waste of time.'

  'No, it's not,' corrected the diplomat. 'Explain to Mr McAllister. Believe me, he's valuable and we need him. He has to understand us.'

  Conklin looked at the undersecretary of state, his expression without charity. 'He doesn't need any explanations from me, he's an analyst. He sees it all as clearly as we do, if not clearer. He knows what the hell is going on down in the tunnels, he just doesn't want to admit it, and the easiest way to remove himself is to pretend to be shocked. Beware

  the sanctimonious intellect in any phase of this business. What he gives in brains he takes away with phoney recriminations. He's the deacon in a whorehouse gathering material for a sermon he'll write when he goes home and plays with himself.'

  'You were right before,' said McAllister, turning towards the doon This is a waste of time.'

  'Edward? Havilland, clearly angry with the crippled CIA man, called out sympathetically to the undersecretary. 'We can't always choose the people we deal with, which is obviously the case now.' 'I understand,' said McAllister coldly. 'Study everyone on Lin's staff,' went on the ambassador. There can't be more than ten or twelve who know anything about us. Help him. He's your friend.'

  'Yes, he is,' said the undersecretary, going out the door. 'Was that necessary? snapped Havilland when he and Conklin were alone.

  'Yes, it was. If you can convince me that what you've done was the only route you could take - which I doubt - or if I can't come up with an option that'll get Marie and David out with their lives, if not their sanity, then I'll have to work with you. The alternative of beyond-salvage is unacceptable on several grounds, basically personal but also because I owe the Webbs. Do we agree so far?'

  'We work together, one way or another. Checkmate.' 'Given the reality, I want that son of a bitch, McAllister, that rabbit, to know where I'm coming from. He's in as deep as any of us, and that intellect of his had better go down into the filth and come up with every plausibility and every possibility. I want to know whom we should kill - even those marginally arrived at - to cut our losses and get the Webbs out. I want him to know that the only way he can save his soul is to bury it with accomplishment. If we fail, he fails, and he can't go back teaching Sunday school any more.' 'You're too harsh on him. He's an analyst not an executioner.' 'Where do you think the executioners get their input?

  Where do we get our input? From whom? The paladins of congressional oversight?

  'Checkmate, again. You're as good as they say you were. He's come up with the breakthroughs. It's why he's here.'

  Talk to me, sir' said Conklin, sitting in the chair, his back straight, his club foot awkwardly at an angle. 'I want to hear your story.'

  'First the woman. Webb's wife. She's all right? She's safe?'

  The answer to your first question is so obvious I wonder how you can ask it. No, she's not all right. Her husband's missing and she doesn't know whether he's alive or dead. As to the second, yes, she's safe. With me, not with you. I can move us around and I know my way around. You have to stay here.'

  'We're desperate,' pleaded the diplomat. 'We need her!'

  'You've also been penetrated, that doesn't seem to sink in. I won't expose her to that.'

  This house is a fortress!'

  'All it takes is one rotten cook in the kitchen. One lunatic on a staircase.'

  'Conklin, listen to me! We picked up a passport check -everything fits. It's him, we know it. Webb's in Peking. Now! He wouldn't have gone in if he wasn't after the target - the only target. If somehow, God knows how, your Delta comes out with the merchandise and his wife isn't in place, he'll kill the one connection we must have! Without it we're lost. We're all lost.'

  'So that was the scenario from the beginning. Reductio ad absurdum. Jason Bourne hunts Jason Bourne.'

  'Yes. Painfully simple, but without the escalating complications he never would have agreed. He'd still be in that old house in Maine, poring over his scholarly papers. We wouldn't have our hunter.'

  'You really are a bastard,' said Conklin slowly, softly, a certain admiration in his voice. 'And you were convinced he could still do it? Still handle this kind of Asia the way he did years ago as Delta?'

  'He has physical checkups every three months, it's part of the government protection programme. He's in superb condition - something to do with his obsessive running, I

  understand.'

  'Start at the beginning.' The CIA man settled into the chair. 'I want to hear it step by step because I think the rumours are true. I'm in the presence of a master bastard.'

  'Hardly, Mr Conklin,' said Havilland. 'We're all groping. I'll want your comments, of course.'

  'You'll get them. Go ahead.'

  'All right. I'll begin with a name I'm sure you'll recognize. Sheng Chou Yang. Any comment?'

  'He's a tough negotiator, and I suspect that underneath his benevolent exterior there's a ramrod. Still, he's one of the most reasonable men in Peking. There should be a thousand like him.' 'If there were, the chances of a Far East holocaust would be a thousand times greater.'

  Lin Wenzu slammed his fist down on the desk, jarring the nine photographs in front of him and making the attached summaries of their dossiers leap off the surface. Which? Which one! Each had been certified by London, each background checked and rechecked
and triple checked again; there was no room for error. These were not simply well-schooled Zhongguo ren selected by bureaucratic elimination but the products of an intensive search for the brightest minds in government - and in several cases outside government -who might be recruited into this most sensitive of services. It had been Lin's contention that the writing was on the wall -the Great Wall, perhaps - and that a superior special intelligence force manned by the colony's own could well be its first line of defence in the years leading up to 1997, and, in the event of a takeover, its first line of cohesive resistance afterwards. The British had to relinquish leadership in the area of secret intelligence operations for reasons that were as clear as they were' unpalatable to London: the Occidental could never fully understand the peculiar subtleties of the Oriental mind, and these were not the times to render misleading or poorly evaluated information. London had to know - the West had to know- exactly where things stood... for Hong Kong's sake, for the sake of the entire Far East.

  Not that Lin believed that his growing task force of intelligence gatherers was pivotal to policy decisions, he did not. But he believed thoroughly, intensely, that if the colony was to have a Special Branch it should be staffed and run by those who could do the job best, and that did not include veterans, however brilliant, of the European-oriented British secret services. For a start, they all looked alike and were not compatible with either the environs or the language. And after years of work and proven-worth, Lin Wenzu had been summoned to London and for three days grilled by unsmiling Far East intelligence specialists. On the morning of the fourth day, however, the smiles had appeared along with the recommendation that the major be given command of the Hong Kong Branch with wide powers of authority. And for a number of years thereafter he had lived up to the commission's confidence, he knew that. He also knew that now, in the single most vital operation of his professional and personal life, he had failed. There were thirty-eight Special Branch officers in his command and he had selected nine -hand picked nine - to be part of this extraordinary, insane operation. Insane until he had heard the ambassador's extraordinary explanation. The nine were the most exceptional of the 38-man task force, each capable of assuming command if their leader was taken out; he had written as much in their evaluation reports. And he had failed. One of the handpicked nine was a traitor.

  It was pointless to re-study the dossiers. Whatever inconsistencies he might find would take too long to unearth for they - or it - had eluded his own experienced eyes as well as London's. There was no time for intricate analyses, the painfully slow exploration of nine individual lives. He had only one choice. A frontal assault on each man, and the word 'front' was intrinsic to his plan. If he could play the role of a taipan, he could play the part of a traitor. He realized that his plan was not without risk - a risk neither London nor the American, Havilland, would tolerate, but it had to be taken. If he failed, Sheng Chou Yang would be alerted to the secret war against him and his counter moves could be disastrous, but Lin Wenzu did not intend to fail. If failure was written on the northern winds nothing else would matter, least of all his life.

  The major reached for his telephone. He pushed the button on his console for the radio operator in the computerized communication centre of MI6, Special Branch.

  'Yes, sir?' said the voice from the white, sterilized room.

  'Who in Dragonfly is still on duty?' asked Lin, naming the elite unit of nine who reported in but never gave explanations.

  'Two, sir. In vehicles Three and Seven, but I can reach the rest in a few minutes. Five have checked in - they're at home -and the remaining two have left numbers. One is at the Pagoda Cinema until eleven-thirty, when he'll return to his flat, but he can be reached by beeper until then. The other is at the Yacht Club in Aberdeen with his wife and her family. She's English, you know.'

  Lin laughed softly. 'No doubt charging the British family's bill to our woefully inadequate budget from London.'

  'Is that possible, Major? If so, would you consider me for Dragonfly, whatever it is?'

  'Don't be impertinent.'

  'I'm sorry, sir-'

  'I'm joking, young man. Next week I'll take you to a fine dinner myself. You do excellent work and I rely on you.'

  'Thank you, sir!'

  The thanks are mine.'

  'Shall I contact Dragonfly and put out an alert?'

  'You may contact each and every one, but quite the opposite of an alert. They've all been overworked, without a clean day off in several weeks. Tell each of them that of course I want any changes of location to be reported, but unless informed otherwise we're secure for the next twenty-four hours, and the men in vehicles Three and Seven may drive them home but not up into the territories for drinks. Tell them I said they should all get a good night's sleep, or however they wish to pass the time.'

  'Yes, sir. They'll appreciate that, sir.'

  'I myself will be wandering around in vehicle Four. You may hear from me. Stay awake.'

  'Of course, Major.'

  'You've got a dinner coming, young man.'

  'If I may, sir,' said the enthusiastic radio operator, 'and I know I speak for all of us. We wouldn't care to work for anyone but you.'

  'Perhaps two dinners.'

  Parked in front of an apartment house on Yun Ping Road, Lin lifted the microphone out of its cradle below the dashboard. 'Radio, its Dragonfly Zero.'

  'Yes, sir?'

  'Switch me to a direct telephone line with a scrambler. I'll know we're on scrambler when I hear the echo on my part of the call, won't I?'

  'Naturally, sir.'

  The faint echo pulsated over the line, with the dial tone. The major punched in the numbers; the ringing began and a female voice answered.

  'Yes?'

  'Mr Zhou. Kuair said Lin, his words rushed, telling the woman to hurry.

  'Certainly,' she replied in Cantonese.

  'Zhou here,' said the man.

  'Xun su! Xiaoxir Lin spoke in a husky whisper; it was the sound of a desperate man pleading to be heard. 'Sheng! Contact instantly! Sapphire is gone!'

  'What? Who is this?'

  The major pressed down the bar and pushed a button to the right of the microphone. The radio operator spoke instantly.

  'Yes, Dragonfly?'

  'Patch into my private line, also on scrambler, and reroute all calls here. Right away! This will be standard procedure until I instruct otherwise. Understood?'

  'Yes, sir,' said a subdued radioman.

  The mobile phone buzzed and Lin picked it up, speaking casually. 'Yes?' he answered, feigning a yawn.

  'Major, this is Zhou! I just had a very strange call. A man phoned me - he sounded badly hurt - and told me to contact someone named Sheng. I was to say that Sapphire was gone.' 'Sapphire? said the major, suddenly alert. 'Say nothing to anyone, Zhou! Damned computers - I don't know how it happened but that call was meant for me. This is beyond Dragonfly. I repeat, say nothing to anyone!'

  'Understood, sir.'

  Lin started the car and drove several blocks west to Tanlung Street. He repeated the exercise and again the call came over his private line.

  'Major?

  'Yes?'

  'I just got off the phone with someone who sounded like he was dying! He wanted me to...'

  The explanation was the same: a dangerous error had been made, beyond the purview of Dragonfly. Nothing was to be repeated. The order was understood.

  Lin called three more numbers, each time from in front of each recipient's apartment or boarding house. All were negative; each man reached him within moments after a call with his startling news and none had raced outside to a random sterile pay phone. The major knew only one thing for certain. Whoever the infiltrator was, he would not use his home phone to make contact. Telephone bills recorded all numbers dialled and all bills were submitted for departmental audit. It was a routine containment procedure that was welcomed by the agents. Excess charges were picked up by Special Branch as if they were related to business.
/>   The two men in vehicles Three and Seven, having been relieved of duty, had checked in with headquarters by the fifth telephone call. One was at a girlfriend's house and made it plain that he had no intention of leaving for the next twenty-four hours. He pleaded with the radioman to take all 'emergency calls from clients', telling everyone who tried to reach him that his superiors had sent him to the Antarctic. Negative. It was not the way of a double agent, including the humour. He neither cut himself off nor revealed the whereabouts or the identity of a drop. The second man was, if possible, more negative. He informed headquarters-communications that he was available for any and all problems, -major or minor, related or unrelated to Dragonfly, even to answering the phones. His wife had recently given birth to triplets, and he confided in a voice that bordered on panic -according to the radioman - he got more rest on the job than at home. Negative.