And why had Delta deliberately used the name Washburn? It was the same as telegraphing a strategy; he knew the name would be picked up sooner or later … Later … After he was inside the gates! Delta was telling whatever was left of Treadstone that he was dealing from strength. He was in a position to expose not only the Treadstone operation, but he could go God knows how much further. Whole networks he had used as Cain, listening posts and ersatz consulates that were no more than electronic espionage stations … even the bloody specter of Medusa. His connection inside the Conseiller was his proof to Treadstone how high up he had traveled. His signal that if he could reach within so rarefied a group of strategists, nothing could stop him. Goddamn it, stop him from what? What was the point? He had the millions; he could have faded!
Conklin shook his head, remembering. There had been a time when he would have let Delta fade; he had told him so twelve hours ago in a cemetery outside of Paris. A man could take only so much, and no one knew that better than Alexander Conklin, once among the finest covert field officers in the intelligence community. Only so much; the sanctimonious bromides about still being alive grew stale and bitter with time. It depended on what you were before, what you became with your deformity. Only so much … But Delta did not fade! He came back with insane statements, insane demands … crazy tactics no experienced intelligence officer would even contemplate. For no matter how much explosive information he possessed, no matter how high he penetrated, no sane man walked back into a minefield surrounded by his enemies. And all the blackmail in the world could not bring you back…
No sane man. No sane man. Conklin sat slowly forward in his chair.
I’m not Cain. He never was. I never was! I wasn’t in New York… It was Carlos. Not me, Carlos! If what you’re saying took place on Seventy-first Street, it was him. He knows!
But Delta had been at the brownstone on Seventy-first Street. Prints—third and index fingers, right hand. And the method of transport was now explained: Air France, Conseiller cover … Fact: Carlos could not have known.
Things come to me … faces, streets, buildings. Images I can’t place … I know a thousand facts about Carlos, but I don’t know why!
Conklin closed his eyes. There was a phrase, a simple code phrase that had been used at the beginning of Treadstone. What was it? It came from Medusa … Cain is for Charlie and Delta is for Cain.
That was it. Cain for Carlos. Delta-Bourne became the Cain that was the decoy for Carlos.
Conklin opened his eyes. Jason Bourne was to replace Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. That was the entire strategy of Treadstone Seventy-One. It was the keystone to the whole structure of deception, the parallax that would draw Carlos out of position into their sights.
Bourne. Jason Bourne. The totally unknown man, a name buried for over a decade, a piece of human debris left in a jungle. But he had existed; that, too, was part of the strategy.
Conklin separated the folders on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. It had no title, only an initial and two numbers followed by a black X, signifying that it was the only folder containing the origins of Treadstone.
T-71 X. The birth of Treadstone Seventy-One.
He opened it, almost afraid to see what he knew was there.
Date of execution. Tam Quan Sector. March 25 …
Conklin’s eyes moved to the calendar on his desk.
March 24.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered, reaching for the telephone.
Dr. Morris Panov walked through the double doors of the psychiatric ward on the third floor of Bethesda’s Naval Annex and approached the nurses’ counter. He smiled at the uniformed aide shuffling index cards under the stern gaze of the head floor nurse standing beside her. Apparently the young trainee had misplaced a patient’s file—if not a patient—and her superior was not about to let it happen again.
“Don’t let Annie’s whip fool you,” said Panov to the flustered girl. “Underneath those cold, inhuman eyes is a heart of sheer granite. Actually, she escaped from the fifth floor two weeks ago but we’re all afraid to tell anybody.”
The aide giggled, the nurse shook her head in exasperation. The phone rang on the desk behind the counter.
“Will you get that, please, dear,” said Annie to the young girl. The aide nodded and retreated to the desk. The nurse turned to Panov. “Doctor Mo, how am I ever going to get anything through their heads with you around?”
“With love, dear Annie. With love. But don’t lose your bicycle chains.”
“You’re incorrigible. Tell me, how’s your patient in Five-A? I know you’re worried about him.”
“I’m still worried.”
“I hear you stayed up all night.”
“There was a three A.M. movie on television I wanted to see.”
“Don’t do it, Mo,” said the matronly nurse. “You’re too young to end up in there.”
“And maybe too old to avoid it, Annie. But thanks.”
Suddenly Panov and the nurse were aware that he was being paged, the wide-eyed trainee at the desk speaking into the microphone.
“Dr. Panov, please. Telephone for—”
“I’m Dr. Panov,” said the psychiatrist in a sotto voce whisper to the girl. “We don’t want anyone to know. Annie Donovan here’s really my mother from Poland. Who is it?” The trainee stared at Panov’s ID card on his white coat, she blinked and replied. “A Mr. Alexander Conklin, sir.”
“Oh?” Panov was startled. Alex Conklin had been a patient on and off for five years, until they both had agreed he’d adjusted as well as he was ever going to adjust—which was not a hell of a lot.
There were so many, and so little they can do for them. Whatever Conklin wanted had to be relatively serious for him to call Bethesda and not the office. “Where can I take this, Annie?”
“Room One,” said the nurse, pointing across the hall. “It’s empty. I’ll have the call transferred.”
Panov walked toward the door, an uneasy feeling spreading through him.
“I need some very fast answers, Mo,” said Conklin, his voice strained.
“I’m not very good at fast answers, Alex. Why not come in and see me this afternoon?”
“It’s not me. It’s someone else. Possibly.”
“No games, please. I thought we’d gone beyond that.”
“No games. This is a Four-Zero emergency, and I need help.”
“Four-Zero? Call in one of your staff men. I’ve never requested that kind of clearance.”
“I can’t. That’s how tight it is.”
“Then you’d better whisper to God.”
“Mo, please! I only have to confirm possibilities, the rest I can put together myself. And I don’t have five seconds to waste. A man may be running around ready to blow away ghosts, anyone he thinks is a ghost. He’s already killed very real, very important people and I’m not sure he knows it. Help me, help him!”
“If I can. Go ahead.”
“A man is placed in a highly volatile, maximum stress situation for a long period of time, the entire period in deep cover. The cover itself is a decoy—very visible, very negative, constant pressure applied to maintain that visibility. The purpose is to draw out a target similar to the decoy by convincing the target that the decoy’s a threat, forcing the target into the open… Are you with me so far?”
“So far,” said Panov. “You say there’s been constant pressure on the decoy to maintain a negative, highly visible profile. What’s been his environment?”
“As brutal as you can imagine.”
“For how long a period of time?”
“Three years,”
“Good God,” said the psychiatrist “No breaks?”
“None at all. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Three years. Someone not himself.”
“When will you damn fools learn? Even prisoners in the worst camps could be themselves, talk to others who were themselves—” Panov stopped, catching his own words and Conklin�
�s meaning.
“That’s your point, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” answered the intelligence officer. “It’s hazy, confusing, even contradictory. What I want to ask is this. Could such a man under these circumstances begin to … believe he’s the decoy, assume the characteristics, absorb the mocked dossier to the point where he believes it’s him?”
“The answer to that’s so obvious I’m surprised you ask it. Of course he could. Probably would. It’s an unendurably prolonged performance that can’t be sustained unless the belief becomes a part of his everyday reality. The actor never off the stage in a play that never ends. Day after day, night after night.” The doctor stopped again, then continued carefully. “But that’s not really your question, is it?”
“No,” replied Conklin. “I go one step further. Beyond the decoy. I have to; it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Panov sharply. “You’d better stop there, because I’m not confirming any blind diagnosis. Not for what you’re leading up to. No way, Charlie. That’s giving you a license I won’t be responsible for—with or without a consultation fee.”
“‘No way … Charlie.’ Why did you say that, Mo?”
“What do you mean, why did I say it? It’s a phrase. I hear it all the time. Kids in dirty blue jeans on the corner; hookers in my favorite saloons.”
“How do you know what I’m leading up to?” said the CIA man.
“Because I had to read the books and you’re not very subtle. You’re about to describe a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia with multiple personalities. It’s not just your man assuming the role of the decoy, but the decoy himself transferring his identity to the one he’s after. The target. That’s what you’re driving at, Alex. You’re telling me your man is three people: himself, decoy and target. And I repeat. No way, Charlie. I’m not confirming anything remotely like that without an extensive examination. That’s giving you rights you can’t have: three reasons for dispatch. No way!”
“I’m not asking you to confirm anything! I just want to know if it’s possible. For Christ’s sake, Mo, there’s a lethally experienced man running around with a gun, killing people he claims he didn’t know, but whom he worked with for three years. He denies being at a specific place at a specific time when his own fingerprints prove he was there. He says images come to him—faces he can’t place, names he’s heard but doesn’t know from where. He claims he was never the decoy; it was never him! But it was! It is! Is it possible? That’s all I want to know. Could the stress and time and the everyday pressures break him like this? Into three?”
Panov held his breath for a moment. “It’s possible,” he said softly. “If your facts are accurate, it’s possible. That’s all I’ll say, because there are too many other possibilities.”
“Thank you.” Conklin paused. “A last question. Say there was a date—a month and a day—that was significant to the mocked dossier—the decoy’s dossier.”
“You’d have to be more specific.”
“I will. It was the date when the man whose identity was taken for decoy was killed.”
“Then obviously not part of the working dossier, but known to your man. Am I following you?”
“Yes, he knew it. Let’s say he was there. Would he remember it?”
“Not as the decoy.”
“But as one of the other two?”
“Assuming the target was also aware of it, or that he’d communicated it through his transference, yes.”
“There’s also a place where the strategy was, conceived, where the decoy was created. If our man was in the vicinity of that place, and the date of death was close at hand, would he be drawn to it? Would it surface and become important to him?”
“It would if it was associated with the original place of death. Because the decoy was born there; it’s possible. It would depend on who he was at the moment.”
“Suppose he was the target?”
“And knew the location?”
“Yes, because another part of him had to.”
“Then he’d be drawn to it. It would be a subconscious compulsion.”
“Why?”
“To kill the decoy. He’d kill everything in sight, but the main objective would be the decoy. Himself.”
Alexander Conklin replaced the phone, his nonexistent foot throbbing, his thoughts so convoluted he had to close his eyes again to find a consistent strain. He had been wrong in Paris … in a cemetery outside of Paris. He had wanted to kill a man for the wrong reasons, the right ones beyond his comprehensions. He was dealing with a madman. Someone whose afflictions were not explained in twenty years of training, but were understandable if one thought about the pains and the losses, the unending waves of violence … all ending in futility. No one knew anything really.
Nothing made sense. A Carlos was trapped, killed today, and another would take his place. Why did we do it … David?
David. I say your name finally. We were friends once, David … Delta. I knew your wife and your children. We drank together and had a few dinners together in far-off posts in Asia. You were the best foreign service officer in the Orient and everyone knew it. You were going to be the key to the new policy, the one that was around the corner. And then it happened. Death from the skies in the Mekong. You turned, David. We all lost, but only one of us became Delta. In Medusa. I did not know you that well—drinks and a dinner or two do not a close companion make—but few of us become animals. You did, Delta.
And now you must die. Nobody can afford you any longer. None of us.
“Leave us, please,” said General Villiers to his aide, as he sat down opposite Marie St. Jacques in the Montmartre café. The aide nodded and walked to a table ten feet away from the booth; he would leave but he was still on guard. The exhausted old sober looked at Marie. “Why did you insist on my coming here? He wanted you out of Paris. I gave him my word.”
“Out of Paris, out of the race,” said Marie, touched by the sight of the old man’s haggard face.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to be another burden for you. I heard the reports on the radio.”
“Insanity,” said Villiers, picking up the brandy his aide had ordered for him. “Three hours with the police, living a terrible lie, condemning a man for a crime that was mine alone.”
“The description was accurate, uncannily accurate. No one could miss him.”
“He gave it to me himself. He sat in front of my wife’s mirror and told me what to say, looking at his own face in the strangest manner. He said it was the only way. Carlos could only be convinced by my going to the police, creating a manhunt. He was right, of course.”
“He was right,” agreed Marie, “but he’s not in Paris, or Brussels, or Amsterdam.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want you to tell me where he’s gone.”
“He told you himself.”
“He lied to me.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because I know when he tells me the truth. You see, we both listen for it.”
“You both …? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t think you would; I was sure he hadn’t told you. When he lied to me on the phone, saying the things he said so hesitantly, knowing I knew they were lies, I couldn’t understand. I didn’t piece it together until I heard the radio reports. Yours and another. That description … so complete, so total, even to the scar on his left temple. Then I knew. He wasn’t going to stay in Paris, or within five hundred miles of Paris. He was going far away—where that description wouldn’t mean very much—where Carlos could be led, delivered to the people Jason had his agreement with. Am I right?”
Villiers put down the glass. “I’ve given my word. You’re to be taken to safety in the country. I don’t understand the things you’re saying.”
“Then I’ll try to be clearer,” said Marie, leaning forward. “There was another report on the radio, one you obviously didn’t h
ear because you were with the police or in seclusion. Two men were found shot to death in a cemetery near Rambouillet this morning. One was a known killer from Saint-Gervais. The other was identified as a former American Intelligence officer living in Paris, a highly controversial man who killed a journalist in Vietnam and was given the choice of retiring from the army or facing a court-martial.”
“Are you saying the incidents are related?” asked the old man.
“Jason was instructed by the American Embassy to go to that cemetery last night to meet with a man flying over from Washington.”
“Washington?”
“Yes. His agreement was with a small group of men from American Intelligence. They tried to kill him last night; they think they have to kill him.”
“Good God, why?”
“Because they can’t trust him. They don’t know what he’s done or where he’s been for a long period of time and he can’t tell them.” Marie paused, closing her eyes briefly. “He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know who they are; and the man from Washington hired other men to kill him last night. That man wouldn’t listen; they think he’s betrayed them, stolen millions from them, killed men he’s never heard of. He hasn’t. But he doesn’t have any clear answers, either. He’s a man with only fragments of a memory, each fragment condemning him. He’s a near total amnesiac.” Villiers’ lined face was locked in astonishment, his eyes pained in recollection. “‘For all the wrong reasons …’ He said that to me. ‘They have men everywhere … the orders are to execute me on sight. I’m hunted by men I don’t know and can’t see. For all the wrong reasons.’”
“For all the wrong reasons,” emphasized Marie, reaching across the narrow table and touching the old man’s arm. “And they do have men everywhere, men ordered to kill him on sight. Wherever he goes, they’ll be waiting.”
“How will they know where he’s gone?”
“He’ll tell them. It’s part of his strategy. And when he does, they’ll kill him. He’s walking into his own trap.”
For several moments Villiers was silent, his guilt overwhelming. Finally he spoke in a whisper.
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