The Bourne Ultimatum jb-3

by Robert Ludlum

  "That's a threat, isn't it?"

  "Stop it, Alex. I don't want to talk like that."

  "But you just did. It's the reverse of Paris thirteen years ago, isn't it? Only now you'll kill me because I'm the one who hasn't a memory, the memory of what we did to you and Marie."

  "That's my family out there!" cried David Webb, his voice tight, sweat forming on his hairline as his eyes filled with tears. "They're a thousand miles away from me and in hiding. It can't be any other way because I won't risk letting them be harmed! ... Killed, Alex, because that's what the Jackal will do if he finds them. It's an island this week; where is it next? How many thousands of miles more? And after that, where will they go-where will we go? Knowing what we know now, we can't stop-he's after me; that goddamned filthy psychopath is after me, and everything we've learned about him tells us he wants a maximum kill. His ego demands it, and that kill includes my family! ... No, field man, don't burden me with things I don't care about-not where they interfere with Marie and the kids-I'm owed that much."

  "I hear you," said Conklin. "I don't know whether I'm hearing David or Jason Bourne, but I hear you. All right, no reverse Paris, but we have to move fast and I'm talking to Bourne now. What's next? Where are you?"

  "I judge about six or seven miles from General Swayne's house," replied Jason, breathing deeply, the momentary anguish suppressed, the coldness returning. "Did you make the call?"

  "Two hours ago."

  "Am I still 'Cobra'?"

  "Why not? It's a snake."

  "That's what I told Armbruster. He wasn't happy."

  "Swayne will be less so, but I sense something and I can't really explain it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm not sure, but I have an idea that he's answerable to someone."

  "In the Pentagon? Burton?"

  "I suppose so, I just don't know. In his partial paralysis he reacted almost as if he was an onlooker, someone involved but not in the middle of the game. He slipped a couple of times and said things like 'We'll have to think about this,' and 'We'll have to confer.' Confer with whom? It was a one-on-one conversation with my usual warning that he wasn't to talk to anyone. His response was a lame editorial 'we,' meaning that the illustrious general was conferring with himself. I don't buy it."

  "Neither do I," agreed Jason. "I'm going to change clothes. They're in the car."

  "What?"

  Bourne turned partially in the plastic shell of the pay phone and glanced around the gas station. He saw what he hoped for, a men's room in the side of the building. "You said that Swayne lives on a large farm west of Manassas-"

  "Correction," interrupted Alex. "He calls it a farm; his neighbors and the tax rolls call it a twenty-eight-acre estate. Not bad for a career soldier from a lower-middle-class family in Nebraska who married a hairdresser in Hawaii thirty years ago, and supposedly bought his manse ten years ago on the strength of a very sizable inheritance from an untraceable benefactor, an obscure wealthy uncle I couldn't find. That's what made me curious. Swayne headed up the Quartermaster Corps in Saigon and supplied Medusa. ... What's his place got to do with your changing clothes?"

  "I want to look around. I'll get there while it's light to see what it's like from the road, then when it's dark I'll pay him a surprise visit."

  "That'll be effective, but why the looking around?"

  "I like farms. They're so spread out and extended and I can't imagine why a professional soldier who knows that he can be transferred anywhere in the world at a moment's notice would saddle himself with such a large investment."

  "The same as my reasoning except I was concerned about the how, not the why. Your approach may be more interesting."

  "We'll see."

  "Be careful. He may have alarms and dogs, things like that."

  "I'm prepared," said Jason Bourne. "I did some shopping after I left Georgetown."

  The summer sun was low in the western sky as he slowed down the rental car and lowered the visor to keep from being blinded by the yellow globe of fire. Soon it would drop behind the Shenandoah mountains, twilight descending, prelude to darkness. And it was the darkness that Jason Bourne craved; it was his friend and ally, the blackness in which he moved swiftly, with sure feet and alert hands and arms that served as sensors against all the impediments of nature. The jungles had welcomed him in the past, knowing that although he was an intruder he respected them and used them as a part of him. He did not fear the jungles, he embraced them, for they protected him and allowed him passage to accomplish whatever his objective was; he was at one with the jungles-as he would have to be with the dense woods that flanked the estate of General Norman Swayne.

  The main house was set back no less than the distance of two football fields from the country road. A stockade fence separated the entrance on the right from the exit on the left, both with iron gates, fronting a deep drive that was basically an elongated U-turn. Immediately bordering each opening was a profusion of tall trees and shrubbery that was in itself a natural extension of the stockade fence both left and right. All that was missing were guardhouses at each point of entry and exit.

  His mind floated back to China, to Beijing and the wild bird sanctuary where he had trapped a killer posing as Jason Bourne. There had been a guardhouse then and a series of armed patrols in the dense forest ... and a madman, a butcher who controlled an army of killers, foremost among them the false Jason Bourne. He had penetrated that deadly sanctuary, crippled a small fleet of trucks and automobiles by plunging the blade of his knife into every tire, then proceeded to take out each patrol in the Jing Shan forest until he found the torch-lit clearing that held a swaggering maniac and his brigade of fanatics. Could he do it all today? wondered Bourne as he drove slowly past Swayne's property for the third time, his eyes absorbing everything he could see. Five years later, thirteen years after Paris? He tried to evaluate the reality. He was not the younger man that he had been in Paris, nor the more mature man in Hong Kong, Macao and Beijing; he was now fifty and he felt it, every year of it. He would not dwell on it. There was too much else to think about, and the twenty-eight acres of General Norman Swayne's property were not the forest primeval of the Jing Shan sanctuary.

  However, as he had done on the primitive outskirts of Beijing, he drove the car off the country road deep into a mass of tall grass and foliage. He climbed out and proceeded to cover the vehicle with bent and broken branches. The rapidly descending darkness would complete the camouflage, and with the darkness he would go to work. He had changed his clothes in the men's room at the gas station: black trousers below a black long-sleeved, skintight pullover; and black thick-soled sneakers with heavy tread. These were his working apparel. The items he spread on the ground were his equipment, the shopping he had done after leaving Georgetown. They included a long-bladed hunting knife whose scabbard he threaded into his belt; a dual-chambered CO2 pistol, encased in a nylon shoulder holster, that silently shot immobilizing darts into attacking animals, such as pit bulls; two flares designed to assist stranded drivers in broken-down cars to attract or deter other motorists; a pair of small Zeiss Ikon 8x10 binoculars attached to his trousers by a Velcro strip; a penlight; raw-hide laces; and finally, pocket-sized wire cutters in case there was a metal fence. Along with the automatic supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency, the gear was either lashed to his belt or concealed in his clothing. The darkness came and Jason Bourne walked into the woods.

  The white sheet of ocean spray burst up from the coral reef and appeared suspended, the dark blue waters of the Caribbean serving as a backdrop. It was that hour of early evening, a long sundown imminent, when Tranquility Isle was bathed in alternating hot tropical colors, pockets of shadows constantly changing with each imperceptible descent of the orange sun. The resort complex of Tranquility Inn had seemingly been cut out of three adjacent rock-strewn hills above an elongated beach sandwiched between huge natural jetties of coral. Two rows of balconied pink villas with bright red roofs of terra-cotta extend
ed from each side of the resort's central hub, a large circular building of heavy stone and thick glass, all the structures overlooking the water, the villas connected by a white concrete path bordered by low-cut shrubbery and lined with ground lamps. Waiters in yellow guayabera jackets wheeled room-service tables along the path, delivering bottles and ice and canapés to Tranquility's guests, the majority of whom sat on their individual balconies savoring the end of the Caribbean day. And as the shadows became more prominent, other people unobtrusively appeared along the beach and on the long dock that extended out over the water. These were neither guests nor service employees; they were armed guards, each dressed in a dark brown tropical uniform and-again unobtrusively-with a MAC-10 machine pistol strapped to his belted waist. On the opposite side of each jacket and hooked to the cloth was a pair of Zeiss Ikon 8x10 binoculars continuously used to scan the darkness. The owner of Tranquility Inn was determined that it live up to its name.

  On the large circular balcony of the villa nearest the main building and the attached glass-enclosed dining room, an elderly infirm woman sat in a wheelchair sipping a glass of Château Carbonnieux '78 while drinking in the splendors of sundown. She absently touched the bangs of her imperfectly dyed red hair as she listened. She heard the voice of her man talking with the nurse inside, then the sound of his less than emphatic footsteps as he walked out to join her.

  "My God," she said in French. "I'm going to get pissed!"

  "Why not?" asked the Jackal's courier. "This is the place for it. I see everything through a haze of disbelief myself."

  "You still will not tell me why the monseigneur sent you here-us here?"

  "I told you, I'm merely a messenger."

  "And I don't believe you."

  "Believe. It's important for him but of no consequence for us. Enjoy, my lovely."

  "You always call me that when you won't explain."

  "Then you should learn from experience not to inquire, is it not so?"

  "It is not so, my dear. I'm dying-"

  "We'll hear no more of that!"

  "It's true nevertheless; you cannot keep it from me. I don't worry for myself, the pain will end, you see, but I worry about you. You, forever better than your circumstances, Michel– No, no, you are Jean Pierre, I must not forget that. ... Still, I must concern myself. This place, these extraordinary lodgings, this attention. I think you will pay a terrible price, my dear."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It's all so grand. Too grand. Something's wrong."

  "You concern yourself too deeply."

  "No, you deceive yourself too easily. My brother, Claude, has always said you take too much from the monseigneur. One day the bill will be presented to you."

  "Your brother, Claude, is a sweet old man with feathers in his head. It's why the monseigneur gives him only the most insignificant assignments. You send him out for a paper in Montparnasse he ends up in Marseilles not knowing how he got there." The telephone inside the villa rang, interrupting the Jackal's man. He turned. "Our new friend will get it," he said.

  "She's a strange one," added the old woman. "I don't trust her."

  "She works for the monseigneur."

  "Really?"

  "I haven't had time to tell you. She will relay his instructions."

  The uniformed nurse, her light brown hair pulled severely back into a bun, appeared in the doorway. "Monsieur, it is Paris," she said, her wide gray eyes conveying an urgency missing in her low, understated voice.

  "Thank you." The Jackal's courier walked inside, following the nurse to the telephone. She picked it up and handed it to him. "This is Jean Pierre Fontaine."

  "Blessings upon you, child of God," said the voice several thousand miles away. "Is everything suitable?"

  "Beyond description," answered the old man. "It is ... so grand, so much more than we deserve."

  "You will earn it."

  "However I may serve you."

  "You'll serve me by following the orders given to you by the woman. Follow them precisely with no deviation whatsoever, is that understood?"

  "Certainly."

  "Blessings upon you." There was a click and the voice was no more.

  Fontaine turned to address the nurse, but she was not at his side. Instead, she was across the room, unlocking the drawer of a table. He walked over to her, his eyes drawn to the contents of the drawer. Side by side were a pair of surgical gloves, a pistol with a cylindrical silencer attached to the barrel, and a straight razor, the blade recessed.

  "These are your tools," said the woman, handing him the key, her flat, expressionless gray eyes boring into his own, "and the targets are in the last villa on this row. You are to familiarize yourself with the area by taking extended walks on the path, as old men do for circulatory purposes, and you are to kill them. You are to do this wearing the gloves and firing the gun into each skull. It must be the head. Then each throat must be slit-"

  "Mother of God, the children's?"

  "Those are the orders."

  "They're barbaric!"

  "Do you wish me to convey that judgment?"

  Fontaine looked over at the balcony door, at his woman in the wheelchair. "No, no, of course not."

  "I thought not. ... There is a final instruction. With whosesoever blood is most convenient, you are to write on the wall the following: 'Jason Bourne, brother of the Jackal.' "

  "Oh, my God. ... I'll be caught, of course."

  "That's up to you. Coordinate the executions with me and I'll swear a great warrior of France was in this villa at the time."

  "Time? ... What is the time? When is this to be done?"

  "Within the next thirty-six hours."

  "Then what?"

  "You may stay here until your woman dies."

  9

  Brendan Patrick Pierre Prefontaine was again astonished. Though he had no reservation, the front desk of Tranquility Inn treated him like a visiting celebrity, then only moments after he had secured a villa told him that he already had a villa and asked How was the flight from Paris? Confusion descended for several minutes as the owner of Tranquility Inn could not be reached for consultation; he was not at his residence, and if he was on the premises he could not be found. Ultimately hands were thrown up in frustration and the former judge from Boston was taken to his lodgings, a lovely miniature house overlooking the Caribbean. By accident, hardly by design, he had reached into the wrong pocket and given the manager behind the desk a fifty-dollar American bill for his courtesy. Prefontaine instantly became a man to be reckoned with; fingers snapped and palms hit bells rapidly. Nothing was too splendid for the bewildering stranger who had suddenly flown in on the seaplane from Montserrat. ... It was the name that had thrown everyone behind Tranquility's front desk into confusion. Could such a coincidence be possible? ... Still the Crown governor– Err on the safe side. Get the man a villa.

  Once settled, his casual clothes distributed in the closet and the bureau, the craziness continued. A chilled bottle of Château Carbonnieux '78 accompanied fresh-cut flowers, and a box of Belgian chocolates arrived, only to have a confused room-service waiter return to remove them, apologizing for the fact that they were for another villa down the line-or up the line-he thought, mon.

  The judge changed into Bermuda shorts, wincing at the sight of his spindly legs, and put on a subdued paisley sport shirt. White loafers and a white cloth cap completed his tropical outfit; it would be dark soon and he wanted a stroll. For several reasons.

  "I know who Jean Pierre Fontaine is," said John St. Jacques, reading the register behind the front desk, "he's the one the CG's office called me about, but who the hell is B. P. Prefontaine?"

  "An illustrious judge from the United States," declared the tall black assistant manager in a distinct British accent. "My uncle, the deputy director of immigration, phoned me from the airport roughly two hours ago. Unfortunately, I was upstairs when the confusion arose, but our people did the right thing."

  "A judge?" asked the owner
of Tranquility Inn as the assistant manager touched St. Jacques's elbow, gesturing for him to move away from the desk and the clerks. Both men did so. "What did your uncle say?"

  "There must be total privvissy where our two distinguished guests are concerned."

  "Why wouldn't there be? What does that mean?"

  "My uncle was very discreet, but he did allow that he watched the honored judge go to the Inter-Island counter and purchase a ticket. He further permitted himself to say that he knew he had been right. The judge and the French war hero are related and wish to meet confidentially on matters of great import."

  "If that was the case, why didn't the honored judge have a reservation?"

  "There appear to be two possible explanations, sir. According to my uncle, they were originally to meet at the airport but the Crown governor's reception line precluded it."

  "What's the second possibility?"

  "An error may have been made in the judge's own offices in Boston, Massachusetts. According to my uncle, there was a brief discussion regarding the judge's law clerks, how they are prone to errors and if one had been made with his passport, he'd fly them all down to apologize."

  "Then judges are paid a lot more in the States than they are in Canada. He's damned lucky we had space."

  "It's the summer season, sir. We usually have available space during these months."

  "Don't remind me. ... All right, so we've got two illustrious relatives who want to meet privately but go about it in a very complicated way. Maybe you should call the judge and tell him what villa Fontaine is in. Or Prefontaine-whichever the hell it is.