The Bourne Identity jb-1

by Robert Ludlum

  He unlocked the door, then opened it, holding his breath in case he was wrong about the alarm; he was not. He climbed in behind the wheel, adjusting his position until he was as comfortable as he could be, grateful that the car had an automatic shift. The large weapon in his belt inhibited him. He placed it on the seat beside him, then reached for the ignition, assuming the key that had unlocked the door was the proper one.

  It was not. He tried the one next to it, but it, too, would not fit. For the trunk, he assumed. It was the third key.

  Or was it? He kept stabbing at the opening. The key would not enter; he tried the second again; it was blocked. Then the first. None of the keys would fit into the ignition! Or were the messages from brain to limb to fingers too garbled, his coordination too inadequate! Goddamn it! Try again!

  A powerful light came from his left, burning his eyes, blinding him. He grabbed for the gun, but a second beam shot out from the right; the door was yanked open and a heavy flashlight crashed down on his hand, another hand taking the weapon from the seat.

  “Get out!” The order came from his left, the barrel of a gun pressed into his neck.

  He climbed out, a thousand coruscating circles of white in his eyes. As vision slowly came back to him, the first thing he saw was the outline of two circles. Gold circles; the spectacles of the killer who had hunted him throughout the night. The man spoke.

  “They say in the laws of physics that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The behavior of certain men under certain conditions is similarly predictable. For a man like you one sets up a gauntlet, each combatant told what to say if he falls. If he does not fall, you are taken. If he does, you are misled, lulled into a false sense of progress.”

  “It’s a high degree of risk,” said Jason. “For those in the gauntlet.”

  “They’re paid well. And there’s something else—no guarantee, of course, but it’s there. The enigmatic Bourne does not kill indiscriminately. Not out of compassion, naturally, but for a far more practical reason. Men remember when they’ve been spared; he infiltrates the armies of others.

  Refined guerrilla tactics applied to a sophisticated battleground. I commend you.”

  “You’re a horse’s ass.” It was all Jason could think to say. “But both your men are alive, if that’s what you want to know.”

  Another figure came into view, led from the shadows of the building by a short, stocky man. It was the woman; it was Marie St. Jacques.

  “That’s him,” she said softly, her look unwavering.

  “Oh, my God…” Bourne shook his head in disbelief. “How was it done, Doctor?” he asked her, raising his voice. “Was someone watching my room at the Carillon? Was the elevator timed, the others shut down? You’re very convincing. And I thought you were going to crash into a police car.”

  “As it turned out,” she replied, “it wasn’t necessary. These are the police.” Jason looked at the killer in front of him; the man was adjusting his gold spectacles. “I commend you,” he said.

  “A minor talent,” answered the killer. “The conditions were right. You provided them.”

  “What happens now? The man inside said I was to be taken, not killed.”

  “You forget. He was told what to say.” The Swiss paused. “So this is what you look like. Many of us have wondered during the past two or three years. How much speculation there’s been! How many contradictions! He’s tall, you know; no, he’s of medium height. He’s blond; no, he has dark black hair. Very light blue eyes, of course; no, quite clearly they are brown. His features are sharp; no, they’re really quite ordinary, can’t pick him out in a crowd. But nothing was ordinary. It was all extraordinary.”

  Your features have been softened, the character submerged. Change your hair, you change your face … Certain types of contact lenses are designed to alter the color of the eyes… Wear glasses, you’re a different man.. Visas, passports … switched at will.

  The design was there. Everything fit. Not all the answers, but more of the truth than he wanted to hear.

  “I’d like to get this over with,” said Marie St. Jacques, stepping forward. “I’ll sign whatever I have to sign—at your office, I imagine. But then I really must get back to the hotel. I don’t have to tell you what I’ve been through tonight.”

  The Swiss glanced at her through his gold-rimmed glasses. The stocky man who had led her out of the shadows took her arm. She stared at both men, then down at the hand that held her.

  Then at Bourne. Her breathing stopped, a terrible realization becoming clear. Her eyes grew wide.

  “Let her go,” said Jason. “She’s on her way back to Canada. You’ll never see her again.”

  “Be practical, Bourne. She’s seen us. We two are professionals; there are rules.” The man flicked his gun up under Jason’s chin, the barrel pressed once more into Bourne’s throat. He ran his left hand about his victim’s clothes, felt the weapon in Jason’s pocket and took it out. “I thought as much,” he said, and turned to the stocky man. “Take her in the other car. The Limmat.” Bourne froze. Marie St. Jacques was to be killed, her body thrown into the Limmat River.

  “Wait a minute!” Jason stepped forward; the gun was jammed into his neck, forcing him back into the hood of the car. “You’re being stupid! She works for the Canadian government. They’ll be all over Zurich.”

  “Why should that concern you? You won’t be here.”

  “Because it’s a waste!” cried Bourne. “We’re professionals, remember?”

  “You bore me.” The killer turned to the stocky man. “Geh! Schnell. Guisan Quai!”

  “Scream your goddamn head off!” shouted Jason. “Start yelling! Don’t stop!” She tried, the scream cut short by a paralyzing blow to her throat. She fell to the pavement as her would-be executioner dragged her toward a small nondescript black sedan.

  “That was stupid,” said the killer, peering through his gold-rimmed spectacles into Bourne’s face.

  “You only hasten the inevitable. On the other hand, it will be simpler now. I can free a man to tend to our wounded. Everything’s so military, isn’t it? It really is a battlefield.” He turned to the man with the flashlight “Signal Johann to go inside. We’ll come back for them.” The flashlight was switched on and off twice. A fourth man, who had opened the door of the small sedan for the condemned woman, nodded. Marie St. Jacques was thrown into the rear seat, the door slammed shut. The man named Johann started for the concrete steps, nodding now at the executioner.

  Jason felt sick as the engine of the small sedan was gunned and the car bolted away from the curb into the Steppdeckstrasse, the twisted chrome bumper disappearing into the shadows of the street.

  Inside that car was a woman he had never seen in his life … before three hours ago. And he had killed her. “You don’t lack for soldiers,” he said.

  “If there were a hundred men I could trust, I’d pay them willingly. As they say, your reputation precedes you.”

  “Suppose I paid you. You were at the bank; you know I’ve got funds.”

  “Probably millions, but I wouldn’t touch a franc note.”

  “Why? Are you afraid?”

  “Most assuredly. Wealth is relative to the amount of time one has to enjoy it. I wouldn’t have five minutes.” The killer turned to his subordinate. “Put him inside. Strip him. I want photographs taken of him naked—before and after he leaves us. You’ll find a great deal of money on him; I want him holding it. I’ll drive.” He looked again at Bourne. “Carlos will get the first print. And I have no doubt that I’ll be able to sell the others quite profitably on the open market. Magazines pay outrageous prices.”

  “Why should ‘Carlos’ believe you? Why should anyone believe you? You said it: no one knows what I look like.”

  “I’ll be covered,” said the Swiss. “Sufficient unto the day. Two Zurich bankers will step forward identifying you as one Jason Bourne. The same Jason Bourne who met the excessively rigid standards set by Swiss law for the r
elease of a numbered account. It will be enough.” He spoke to the gunman. “Hurry! I have cables to send. Debts to collect.” A powerful arm shot over Bourne’s shoulder, vicing his throat in a hammerlock. The barrel of a gun was jolted into his spine, pain spreading throughout his chest as he was dragged inside the sedan. The man holding him was a professional; even without his wounds it would have been impossible to break the grip. The gunman’s expertise, however, did not satisfy the bespectacled leader of the hunt. He climbed behind the wheel and issued another command.

  “Break his fingers,” he said.

  The armlock briefly choked off Jason’s air as the barrel of the gun crashed down repeatedly on his hand—hands. Instinctively, Bourne had swung his left hand over his right, protecting it. As the blood burst from the back of his left, he twisted his fingers, letting it flow between them until both hands were covered. He choked his screams; the grip lessened; he shouted.

  “My hands! They’re broken!”

  “Gut.”

  But they were not broken; the left was damaged to the point where it was useless; not the right.

  He moved his fingers in the shadows; his hand was intact.

  The car sped down the Steppdeckstrasse and swung into a sidestreet, heading south. Jason collapsed back in the seat, gasping. The gunman tore at his clothes, ripping his shirt, yanking at his belt. In seconds his upper body would be naked; passport, papers, cards, money no longer his, all the items intrinsic to his escape from Zurich taken from him. It was now or it was not to be. He screamed.

  “My leg! My goddamned leg!” He lurched forward, his right hand working furiously in the dark, fumbling under the cloth of his trouser leg. He felt it. The handle of the automatic.

  “Nein!” roared the professional in the front. “Watch him!” He knew; it was instinctive knowledge.

  It was also too late. Bourne held the gun in the darkness of the floor; the powerful soldier pushed him back. He fell with the blow, the revolver, now at his waist, pointed directly at his attacker’s chest.

  He fired twice; the man arched backward. Jason fired again, his aim sure, the heart punctured; the man fell over into the recessed jump seat.

  “Put it down!” yelled Bourne, swinging the revolver over the rounded edge of the front seat, pressing the barrel into the base of the driver’s skull. “Drop it!” His breathing erratic, the killer let the gun fall. “We will talk,” he said, gripping the wheel. “We are professionals. We will talk.” The large automobile lurched forward, gathering speed, the driver increasing pressure on the accelerator.

  “Slow down!”

  “What is your answer?” The car went faster. Ahead were the headlights of traffic; they were leaving the Steppdeckstrasse district, entering the busier city streets. “You want to get out of Zurich, I can get you out. Without me, you can’t. All I have to do is spin the wheel, crash into the pavement.

  I have nothing whatsoever to lose, Herr Bourne. There are police everywhere up ahead. I don’t think you want the police.”

  “We’ll talk,” lied Jason. Everything was timing, split-second timing. There were now two killers in a speeding enclosure that was in itself a trap. Neither killer was to be trusted; both knew it. One had to make use of that extra half-second the other would not take.’ Professionals. “Put on the brakes,” said Bourne.

  “Drop your gun on the seat next to mine.”

  Jason released the weapon. It fell on top of the killer’s, the ring of heavy metal proof of contact.

  “Done.”

  The killer took his foot off the accelerator, transferring it to the brake. He applied the pressure slowly, then in short stabs so that the large automobile pitched back and forth. The jabs on the pedal would become more pronounced; Bourne understood this. It was part of the driver’s strategy, balance a factor of life and death.

  The arrow on the speedometer swung left: 30 kilometers, 18 kilometers, 9 kilometers. They had nearly stopped; it was the moment for the extra half-second of effort—balance a factor, life in balance.

  Jason grabbed the man by the neck, clawing at his throat, yanking him up off the seat. Then he raised his bloody left hand and thrust it forward, smearing the area of the killer’s eyes. He released the throat, surging his right hand down toward the guns on the seat. Bourne gripped a handle, shoving the killer’s hand away; the man screamed, his vision blurred, the gun out of reach. Jason lunged across the man’s chest, pushing him down against the door, elbowing the killer’s throat with his left arm, grabbing the wheel with his bloody palm. He looked up through the windshield and turned the wheel to the right, heading the car toward a pyramid of trash on the pavement.

  The automobile plowed into the mound of debris—a huge, somnambulant insect crawling into garbage, its appearance belying the violence taking place inside its shell.

  The man beneath him lunged up, rolling on the seat. Bourne held the automatic in his hand, his fingers jabbing for the open space of the trigger. He found it. He bent his wrist and fired.

  His would-be executioner went limp, a dark red hole in his forehead.

  In the street, men came running toward what must have looked like a dangerously careless accident.. Jason shoved the dead body across the seat and climbed over behind the wheel. He pushed the gearshift into reverse; the sedan backed awkwardly out of the debris, over the curb and into the street. He rolled down his window, calling out to the would-be rescuers as they approached.

  “Sorry! Everything’s fine! Just a little too much to drink!”

  The small band of concerned citizens broke up quickly, a few making gestures of admonition, others running back to their escorts and companions. Bourne breathed deeply, trying to control the involuntary trembling that seized his entire body. He pulled the gear into drive; the car started forward. He tried to picture the streets of Zurich from a memory that would not serve him.

  He knew vaguely where he was—where he had been—and more important, he knew more clearly where the Guisan Quai was in relationship to the Limmat.

  Geh! Schnell. Guisan Quai!

  Marie St. Jacques was to be killed on the Guisan Quai, her body thrown into the river. There was only one stretch where the Guisan and the Limmat met: it was at the mouth of Lake Zurich, at the base of the western shore. Somewhere in an empty parking lot or a deserted garden overlooking the water, a short, stocky man was about to carry out an execution ordered by a dead man. Perhaps by now the gun had been fired, or a knife plunged into its mark; there was no way to know, but Jason knew he had to find out. Whoever and whatever he was, he could not walk away blindly.

  The professional in him, however, demanded that he swerve into the dark wide alley ahead.

  There were two dead men in the car; they were a risk and a burden he could not tolerate. The precious seconds it would take to remove them could avoid the danger of a traffic policeman looking through the windows and seeing death.

  Thirty-two seconds was his guess; it had taken less than a minute to pull his would-be executioners from the car. He looked at them as he limped around the hood to the door. They were curled up obscenely next to one another against a filthy brick wall. In darkness.

  He climbed behind the wheel and backed out of the alley.

  Geh! Schnell. Guisan Quai!

  9

  He reached an intersection, the traffic light red. Lights. On the left, several blocks east, he could see lights arching gently into the night sky. A bridge! The Limmat! The signal turned green; he swung the sedan to the left.

  He was back on the Bahnhofstrasse; the start of the Guisan Quai was only minutes away. The wide avenue curved around the water’s edge, riverbank and lakefront merging. Moments later, on his left was the silhouetted outline of a park, in summer a stroller’s haven, now dark, devoid of tourists and Zurichers. He passed an entrance for vehicles; there was a heavy chain across the white pavement, suspended between two stone posts. He came to a second, another chain prohibiting access. But it was not the same; something was different, somet
hing odd. He stopped the car and looked closer, reaching across the seat for the flashlight he had taken from his would-be executioner.

  He snapped it on and shot the beam over the heavy chain. What was it? What was different?

  It was not the chain. It was beneath the chain. On the white pavement kept spotless by maintenance crews. There were tire marks, at odds with the surrounding cleanliness. They would not be noticed during the summer months; they were now. It was as if the filth of the Steppdeckstrasse had traveled too well.

  Bourne switched off the flashlight and dropped it on the seat. The pain in his battered left hand suddenly fused with the agony in his shoulder and his arm; he had to push all pain out of his mind; he had to curtail the bleeding as best he could. His shirt had been ripped; he reached inside and ripped it further, pulling out a strip of cloth which he proceeded to wrap around his left hand, knotting it with teeth and fingers. He was as ready as he would ever be.

  He picked up the gun—his would-be executioner’s gun—and checked the clip: full. He waited until two cars had passed him, then extinguished the headlights and made a U-turn, parking next to the chain. He got out, instinctively testing his leg on the pavement, then favoring it as he limped to the nearest post and lifted the hook off the iron circle protruding from the stone. He lowered the chain, making as little noise as possible, and returned to the car.

  He pulled at the gearshift, gently pressed the accelerator, then released it. He was now coasting into the wide expanse of an unlit parking area, made darker by the abrupt end of the white entrance road and the start of a field of black asphalt. Beyond, two-hundred-odd yards in the distance, was the straight dark line of the seawall, a wall that contained no sea but, instead, the currents of the Limmat as they poured into the waters of Lake Zurich. Farther away were the lights of the boats, bobbing in stately splendor. Beyond these were the stationary lights of the Old City, the blurred floodlights of darkened piers. Jason’s eyes took everything in, for the distance was his backdrop; he was looking for shapes in front of it.