The Bourne Identity jb-1

by Robert Ludlum

  “And if he finds it?”

  “If it’s there, he’ll find it.”

  “Then I get in touch with whoever’s listed as the ‘certified directors’ and surface.”

  “Very cautiously,” added Marie. “Through intermediaries. Myself, if you like.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what they’ve done. Or not done, really.”

  “Which is?”

  “They haven’t tried to reach you in nearly six months.”

  “You don’t know that—I don’t know that.”

  “The bank knows it. Millions of dollars left untouched, unaccounted for, and no one has bothered to find out why. That’s what I can’t understand. It’s as though you were being abandoned. It’s where the mistake could have been made.”

  Bourne leaned back in the chair, looking at his bandaged left hand, remembering the sight of the weapon smashing repeatedly downward—in the shadows of a racing car in the Steppdeckstrasse. He raised his eyes and looked at Marie. “What you’re saying is that if I was abandoned, it’s because that mistake is thought to be the truth by the directors at Treadstone.”

  “Possibly. They might think you’ve involved them in illegal transactions—with criminal elements—that could cost them millions more. Conceivably risking expropriation of entire companies by angry governments. Or that you joined forces with an international crime syndicate, probably not knowing it. Anything. It would account for their not going near the bank. They’d want no guilt by association.”

  “So, in a sense, no matter what your friend Peter learns, I’m still back at square one.”

  “We’re back, but it’s not square one, more like four-and-a-half to five on a scale of ten.”

  “Even if it were nine, nothing’s really changed. Men want to kill me and I don’t know why. Others could stop them but they won’t. That man at the Drei Alpenhäuser said Interpol has its nets out for me, and if I walk into one I don’t have any answers. I’m guilty as charged because I don’t know what I’m guilty of. Having no memory isn’t much of a defense, and it’s possible that I have no defense, period.”

  “I refuse to believe that, and so must you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it, Jason. Stop it.”

  Stop it. How many times do I say that to myself? You are my love, the only woman I have ever known, and you believe in me. Why can’t I believe in myself?

  Bourne got up, as always testing his legs. Mobility was coming back to him, the wounds less severe than his imagination had permitted him to believe. He had made an appointment that night with the doctor in Wohlen to remove the stitches. Tomorrow, change would come.

  “Paris,” said Jason. “The answer’s in Paris. I know it as surely as I saw the outline of those triangles in Zurich. I just don’t know where to begin. It’s crazy. I’m a man waiting for an image, for a word or a phrase—or a book of matches—to tell me something. To send me somewhere else.”

  “Why not wait until I hear from Peter? I can call him tomorrow; we can be in Paris tomorrow.”

  “Because it wouldn’t make any difference, don’t you see? No matter what he came up with, the one thing I need to know wouldn’t be there. For the same reason Treadstone hasn’t gone near the bank. Me. I have to know why men want to kill me, why someone named Carlos will pay … what was it … a fortune for my corpse.”

  It was as far as he got, interrupted by the crash at the table. Marie had dropped her cup and was staring at him, her face white, as if the blood had drained from her head. “What did you just say?” she asked.

  “What? I said I have to know …”

  “The name. You just said the name Carlos.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In all the hours we’ve talked, the days we’ve been together, you never mentioned him.” Bourne looked at her, trying to remember. It was true; he had told her everything that had come to him, yet somehow he had omitted Carlos … almost purposely, as if blocking it out.

  “I guess I didn’t,” he said. “You seem to know. Who’s Carlos?”

  “Are you trying to be funny? If you are, the joke’s not very good.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t think there’s anything to be funny about. Who’s Carlos?”

  “My God—you don’t know!” she exclaimed, studying his eyes. “It’s part of what was taken from you.”

  “Who is Carlos?”

  “An assassin. He’s called the assassin of Europe. A man hunted for twenty years, believed to have killed between fifty and sixty political and military figures. No one knows what he looks like … but it’s said he operates out of Paris.”

  Bourne felt a wave of cold going through him.

  The taxi to Wohlen was an English Ford belonging to the concierge’s son-in-law. Jason and Marie sat in the back seat, the dark countryside passing swiftly outside the windows. The stitches had been removed, replaced by soft bandages held by wide strips of tape.

  “Get back to Canada,” said Jason softly, breaking the silence between them.

  “I will, I told you that. I’ve a few more days left. I want to see Paris.”

  “I don’t want you in Paris. I’ll call you in Ottawa. You can make the Treadstone search yourself and give me the information over the phone.”

  “I thought you said it wouldn’t make any difference. You had to know the why; the who was meaningless until you understood.”

  “I’ll find a way. I just need one man; I’ll find him.”

  “But you don’t know where to begin. You’re a man waiting for an image, for a phrase, or a book of matches. They may not be there.”

  “Something will be there.”

  “Something is, but you don’t see it. I do. It’s why you need me. I know the words, the methods.”

  “You don’t.”

  Bourne looked at her in the rushing shadows. “I think you’d better be clearer.”

  “The banks, Jason. Treadstone’s connections are in the banks. But not in the way that you might think.”

  The stooped old man in the threadbare overcoat, black beret in hand, walked down the far left aisle of the country church in the village of Arpajon, ten miles south of Paris. The bells of the evening Angelus echoed throughout the upper regions of stone and wood; the man held his place at the fifth row and waited for the ringing to stop. It was his signal; he accepted it, knowing that during the pealing of the bells another, younger man—as ruthless as any man alive—had circled the small church and studied everyone inside and outside. Had that man seen anything he did not expect to see, anyone he considered a threat to his person, there would be no questions asked, simply an execution. That was the way of Carlos, and only those who understood that their lives could be snuffed out because they themselves had been followed accepted money to act as the assassin’s messenger. They were all like himself, old men from the old days, whose lives were running out, months remaining limited by age, or disease, or both.

  Carlos permitted no risks whatsoever, the single consolation being that if one died in his service—or by his hand—money would find its way to old women, or the children of old women, or their children. It had to be said: there was a certain dignity to be found in working for Carlos.

  And there was no lack of generosity. This was what his small army of infirm old men understood; he gave a purpose to the ends of their lives.

  The messenger clutched his beret and continued down the aisle to the row of confessional booths against the left wall. He walked to the fifth booth, parted the curtain, and stepped inside, adjusting his eyes to the light of a single candle that glowed from the other side of the translucent drape separating priest from sinner. He sat down on the small wooden bench and looked at the silhouette in the holy enclosure. It was as it always was, the hooded figure of a man in a monk’s habit. The messenger tried not to imagine what that man looked like; it was not his place to speculate on such things.

  “Angelus Domini,” he said.

  “An
gelus Domini, child of God,” whispered the hooded silhouette. “Are your days comfortable?”

  “They draw to an end,” replied the old man, making the proper response, “but they are made comfortable.”

  “Good. It’s important to have a sense of security at your age,” said Carlos. “But to business. Did you get the particulars from Zurich?”

  “The owl is dead; so are two others, possibly a third. Another’s hand was severely wounded; he cannot work. Cain disappeared. They think the woman is with him.”

  “An odd turn of events,” said Carlos.

  “There’s more. The one ordered to kill her has not been heard from. He was to take her to the Guisan Quai; no one knows what happened.”

  “Except that a watchman was killed in her place. It’s possible she was never a hostage at all, but instead, bait for a trap. A trap that snapped back on Cain. I want to think about that. In the meantime, here are my instructions. Are you ready?”

  The old man reached into his pocket and took out the stub of a pencil and a scrap of paper.

  “Very well.”

  “Telephone Zurich. I want a man in Paris by tomorrow who has seen Cain, who can recognize him. Also, Zurich is to reach Koenig at the Gemeinschaft and tell him to send his tape to New York. He’s to use the post office box in Village Station.”

  “Please,” interrupted the aged messenger. “These old hands do not write as they once did.”

  “Forgive me,” whispered Carlos. “I’m preoccupied and inconsiderate. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all, not at all. Go ahead.”

  “Finally, I want our team to take rooms within a block of the bank on the rue Madeleine. This time the bank will be Cain’s undoing. The pretender will be taken at the source of his misplaced pride. A bargain price, as despicable as he is … unless he’s something else.”

  11

  Bourne watched from a distance as Marie passed through customs and immigration in Bern’s airport, looking for signs of interest or recognition from anyone in the crowd that stood around Air France’s departure area. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the busiest hour for flights to Paris, a time when privileged businessmen hurried back to the City of Light after dull company chores at the banks in Bern. Marie glanced over her shoulder as she walked through the gate; he nodded, waited until she had disappeared, then turned and started for the Swissair lounge. George B. Washburn had a reservation on the 4:30 plane to Orly.

  They would meet later at the café Marie remembered from visits during her Oxford days. It was called Au Coin de Cluny, on the boulevard Saint-Michel several blocks from the Sorbonne. If by any chance it was no longer there, Jason would find her around nine o’clock on the steps of the Cluny Museum.

  Bourne would be late, nearby but late. The Sorbonne had one of the most extensive libraries in all Europe and somewhere in that library were back issues of newspapers. University libraries were not subject to the working hours of government employees; students used them during the evenings. So would he as soon as he reached Paris. There was something he had to learn.

  Every day I read the newspapers. In three languages. Six months ago a man was killed, his death reported on the front page of each of those newspapers. So said a fat man in Zurich.

  He left his suitcase at the library checkroom and walked to the second floor, turning left toward the arch that led to the huge reading room. The Salle de Lecture was at this annex, the newspapers on spindles placed in racks, the issues going back precisely one year from the day’s date.

  He walked along the racks, counting back six months, lifting off the first ten weeks’ worth of papers before that date a half a year ago. He carried them to the nearest vacant table and without sitting down flipped through from front page to front page, issue to issue.

  Great men had died in their beds, while others had made pronouncements; the dollar had fallen, gold risen; strikes had crippled, and governments had vacillated between action and paralysis. But no man had been killed who warranted headlines; there was no such incident—no such assassination.

  Jason returned to the racks and went back further. Two weeks, twelve weeks, twenty weeks.

  Nearly eight months. Nothing.

  Then it struck him; he had gone back in time, not forward from that date six months ago. An error could be made in either direction; a few days or a week, even two. He returned the spindles to the racks and pulled out the papers from four and five months ago.

  Airplanes had crashed and revolutions had erupted bloodily; holy men had spoken only to be rebuked by other holy men; poverty and disease had been found where everyone knew they could be found, but no man of consequence had been killed.

  He started on the last spindle, the mists of doubt and guilt clearing with each turn of a page. Had a sweating fat man in Zurich lied? Was it all a lie? All lies? Was he somehow living a nightmare that could vanish with …

  AMBASSADEUR LELAND

  ASSASSINÉ À MARSEILLE!

  The thick block letters of the headline exploded off the page, hurting his eyes. It was not imagined pain, not invented pain, but a sharp ache that penetrated his sockets and seared through his head. His breathing stopped, his eyes rigid on the name LELAND. He knew it; he could picture the face, actually picture it. Thick brows beneath a wide forehead, a blunt nose centered between high cheekbones and above curiously thin lips topped by a perfectly groomed gray mustache. He knew the face, he knew the man. And the man had been killed by a single shot from a high-powered rifle fired from a waterfront window. Ambassador Howard Leland had walked down a Marseilles pier at five o’clock in the afternoon. His head had been blown off.

  Bourne did not have to read the second paragraph to know that Howard Leland had been Admiral H. R. Leland, United States Navy, until an interim appointment as director of Naval Intelligence preceded his ambassadorship to the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Nor did he have to reach the body of the article where motives for the assassination were speculated upon to know them; he knew them. Leland’s primary function in Paris was to dissuade the French government from authorizing massive arms sales—in particular fleets of Mirage jets—to Africa and the Middle East.

  To an astonishing degree he had succeeded, angering interested parties at all points in the Mediterranean. It was presumed that he had been killed for his interference; a punishment which served as a warning to others. Buyers and sellers of death were not to be hindered.

  And the seller of death who had killed him would have been paid a great deal of money, far from the scene, all traces buried.

  Zurich. A messenger to a legless man; another to a fat man in a crowded restaurant off the Falkenstrasse.

  Zurich.

  Marseilles.

  Jason closed his eyes, the pain now intolerable. He had been picked up at sea five months ago, his port of origin assumed to have been Marseilles. And if Marseilles, the waterfront had been his escape route, a boat hired to take him into the vast expanse of the Mediterranean. Everything fitted too well, each piece of the puzzle sculpted into the next. How could he know the things he knew if he were not that seller of death from a window on the Marseilles waterfront?

  He opened his eyes, pain inhibiting thought, but not all thought, one decision as clear as anything in his limited memory. There would be no rendezvous in Paris with Marie St. Jacques.

  Perhaps one day he would write her a letter, saying the things he could not say now. If he was alive and could write a letter; he could not write one now. There could be no written words of thanks or love, no explanations at all; she would wait for him and he would not come to her. He had to put distance between them; she could not be involved with a seller of death. She had been wrong, his worst fears accurate.

  Oh, God! He could picture Howard Leland’s face, and there was no photograph on the page in front of him! The front page with the terrible headline that triggered so much, confirmed so many things. The date. Thursday, August 26. Marseilles. It was a day he would remember as long as he could reme
mber for the rest of his convoluted life.

  Thursday, August 26 …

  Something was wrong. What was it? What was it? Thursday? … Thursday meant nothing to him.

  The twenty-sixth of August? … The twenty-sixth? It could not be the twenty-sixth! The twenty-sixth was wrong! He had heard it over and over again. Washburn’s diary—his patient’s journal. How often had Washburn gone back over every fact, every phrase, every day and point of progress? Too many times to count. Too many times not to remember!

  You were brought to my door on the morning of Tuesday, August twenty-fourth, at precisely eight-twenty o’clock.

  Your condition was …

  Tuesday, August 24.

  August 24.

  He was not in Marseilles on the twenty-sixth! He could not have fired a rifle from a window on the waterfront. He was not the seller of death in Marseilles; he had not killed Howard Leland!

  Six months ago a man was killed … But it was not six months; it was close to six months but not six months. And he had not killed that man; he was half dead in an alcoholic’s house on Ile de Port Noir.

  The mists were clearing, the pain receding. A sense of elation filled him; he had found one concrete lie! If there was one there could be others!

  Bourne looked at his watch; it was quarter past nine. Marie had left the café; she was waiting for him on the steps of the Cluny Museum. He replaced the spindles in their racks, then started toward the large cathedral door of the reading room, a man in a hurry.

  He walked down the boulevard Saint-Michel, his pace accelerating with each stride. He had the distinct feeling that he knew what it was to have been given a reprieve from hanging and he wanted to share that rare experience. For a time he was out of the violent darkness, beyond the crashing waters; he had found a moment of sunlight—like the moments and the sunlight that had filled a room in a village inn—and he had to reach the one who had given them to him. Reach her and hold her and tell her there was hope.