TREVAYNE
“Trevayne, listen to me. You may never forgive me for what I am about to say to you. If you feel strong enough, I’ll accept the consequences and expect your roughest condemnation tomorrow. I won’t rebut you. But you must think now. The country knows you’ve been chosen. The hearing is only a formality now. If you tell them to shove it, how are you going to do it without paining your wife further?… Don’t you see? This is exactly what they want!”
Trevayne took a deep breath and replied evenly. “I have no intention of paining my wife further or of allowing any part of you to touch us. I don’t need you, Mr. President. Do I make myself clear?”
TREVAYNE
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
TREVAYNE was first published in January 1973
Bantam edition / September 1989
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1973 by Jonathan Ryder.
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Robert Ludlum.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81396-1
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part 2
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part 3
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part 4
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Part 5
Chapter 54
Dedication
Excerpt from The Bourne Identity
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
Every now and then throughout the human odyssey, forces seem to almost accidentally come together, producing men and women of startling wisdom, talent, and insight, and the results are wondrous, indeed. The arts and the sciences speak for themselves, for they are all around us, embellishing our lives with beauty, longevity, knowledge, and convenience. But there is another area of human endeavor that is both an art and a science, and it, too, is all around us—either enriching our lives or destroying them.
It is the guardianship of a given society under the common laws of governance. I’m not a scholar, but the courses in government and political science that I was exposed to in college indelibly left their marks on me. I was hooked, fascinated, smitten, and were it not for stronger proclivities, I might have become the worst politician in the Western world. My “cool” levels off at around 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
For me, one of the truly great achievements of man is open, representative democracy, and the greatest of all the attempts throughout history to create such a system was the magnificent American experiment as expressed in our Constitution. It’s not perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s the best damn thing on the block. But wait.
Someone’s always trying to louse it up.
That’s why I wrote Trevayne nearly two decades ago. It was the time of Watergate, and my pencil flew across the pages in outrage. Younger—not youthful—intemperance made my head explode with such words and phrases as Mendacity! Abuse of Power! Corruption! Police State!
Here was the government, the highest of our elected and appointed officials entrusted with the guardianship of our system, not only lying to the people but collecting millions upon millions of dollars to perpetuate their lies and thus the controls they believed were theirs alone to exercise. One of the most frightening statements to come out of the Watergate hearings was the following, delivered, in essence, by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
“There’s nothing I would not do to keep the presidency …” I don’t have to complete the exact sentence; the meaning was clear—to keep it ours. The presidency and the country was theirs. Not yours, or mine, or even the neighbors across the street with whom we frequently disagreed in things political. Only theirs. The rest of us were somehow neither relevant nor competent. They knew better, therefore the lies had to continue and the coffers of ideological purity kept full so that the impure could be blitzkrieged by money and buried at the starting gates of political contests.
I also had to publish Trevayne under another name. I chose Jonathan Ryder—the first the name of one son, the second a contraction of my wife’s maiden name—not because of potential retribution, but because the conventional wisdom of the time was that a novelist did not author more than a book a year. Why? Damned if I could figure it out—something to do with “marketing psychology,” whatever the hell that is. But wait. All that was nearly twenty years ago.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, say the French. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or perhaps history repeats its follies ad nauseam because man is a creature of helter-skelter appetites and keeps returning to the troughs of poison that make him ill. Or perhaps the sins of the generational parent are borne by the offspring because the kids are too stupid to learn from their parent’s glaring mistakes. Who knows? All that’s been truly documented from time immemorial is that man continues to kill without needing the meat of his quarry; he lies in order to avoid accountability or, conversely, to seize the reins of accountability to such an extent that the social contract between the government and the governed is his alone to write; he endlessly seeks to enrich himself at the expense of the public weal and, while he’s at it, tries all too frequently to turn his personal morality or religion into everyone else’s legality or religiosity, no quarter given to the unbelievers of pariahdom. Good heavens, we could go on and on. But wait.
Last year our country witnessed two of the most disgraceful, debasing, inept, disingenuous, and insulting presidential campaigns that living admirers of our system can recall. The candidates were “packaged” by cynical manipulators of the public’s basest fears; “sound-bite zingers” were preferable to intelligent statements of position; image took precedence over issues. Th
e presidential debates were neither presidential nor debates but canned Pavlovian “responses” more often than not having little or nothing to do with the questions. The ground rules for these robotic pavanes were drawn up by glib intellectual misfits who thought so ill of their clients that they refused to allow them to speak beyond two minutes! The orators of the cradle of democracy that was ancient Athens, wherever they are, can be heard vomiting. Perhaps one bright day in the future we’ll return to legitimate, civilized campaigns, where an open exchange of ideas can be heard, but this will not happen, I’m afraid, until those who convince us to buy deodorants hie back to the armpits. They’ve worn out their welcome in the election process, for they have committed the two cardinal sins of their profession—at the same time. They’ve made their “products” appear simultaneously both offensive and boring. Of course, there’s a solution. If I were either candidate, I’d refuse to pay them on the grounds of their moral turpitude—hell, it’s as good a reason as any. Which of those imagemakers would go into court expounding one way or the other on that one? Enough. The campaigns turned off the country.
This numbing fiasco followed barely twenty-four months after we citizens of the Republic had been exposed to a series of events so ludicrous they would have been a barrel of laughs but for their obscenity. Unelected (?) officials fueled the fires of terrorism by selling arms to a terrorist state while demanding that our allies do no such thing. Guilt became innocence; malfeasance brought honor-to-office; zealous, obsequious poseurs were heroes; to be present was to be absent; and to have creatures soiling the basement was a sign of efficient house management. By comparison, Alice’s looking-glass world was a place of incontestable logic. But wait—all right, you’re ahead of me.
Someone’s always trying to louse it up. That great experiment, that wonderful system of ours based on open checks and balances. Mendacity? Abuse of Power? Corruption? Police State?
Well, certainly not with lasting effect as long as citizens can voice such speculations and shout their accusations, however extreme. We can be heard. That’s our strength and it’s indomitable.
So, in a modest way, I’ll try to be heard again in that voice from another time, another era, always remembering that I’m fundamentally and merely a storyteller who hopes you enjoy the entertainment, but perhaps will permit me an idea or two.
I have not attempted to “update” the novel or adjust the licenses I took with actual events or geography, for they served the story I was writing. As anyone who has built or remodeled a home will tell you, once you start tinkering, you may as well throw away the schematics. It becomes a different house.
Thanks for your attention.
ROBERT LUDLUM
a.k.a. (briefly) Jonathan Ryder
November 1988
PART 1
1
The smoothly tarred surface of the road abruptly stopped and became dirt. At this point on the small peninsula the township’s responsibility ended and the area of private property began. According to the United States Post Office, South Greenwich, Connecticut, the delivery route was listed on the map as Shore Road, Northwest, but to the carriers who drove out in the mail trucks it was known simply as High Barnegat, or just Barnegat.
And the carriers drove out frequently, three or four times a week, with special-delivery letters and certified-receipt-requested manila envelopes. They never minded the trip, because they received a dollar each time they made a delivery.
High Barnegat.
Eight acres of ocean property with nearly a half-mile bordering directly on the sound. Most of the acreage was wild, allowed to grow unhampered, untamed. What seemed contradictory in spirit was the compound—the house and grounds seventy yards up from the central beach. The long rambling house was contemporary in design, great expanses of glass encased in wood looking out over the water. The lawns were deep green and thick, manicured and broken up by flagstone paths and a large terrace directly above the boathouse.
It was late August, the best part of the summer at High Barnegat. The water was as warm as it would ever be; the winds came off the sound in gusts which made the sailing more exciting—or hazardous—depending on one’s point of view; the foliage was at its fullest green. In late August a sense of calm replaced the hectic weeks of summer fun. The season was nearly over. Men thought once again of normal weekends and five full days of business; women began the agonizing process of selection and purchase that signaled the start of the new school year.
Minds and motives were slowly changing gears. Frivolity was ebbing; there were more serious things to consider.
And the steady flow of house guests diminished at High Barnegat.
It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and Phyllis Trevayne reclined in a lounge chair on the terrace, letting the warm sun wash over her body. She thought, with a degree of satisfaction, that her daughter’s bathing suit fitted her rather comfortably. Since she was forty-two and her daughter seventeen, satisfaction could have turned into minor triumph if she allowed herself to dwell on it. But she couldn’t because her thoughts kept returning to the telephone, to the call from New York for Andrew. She had answered on the terrace phone, because the cook was still in town with the children and her husband was still a small white sail far out on the water. She’d nearly let the phone ring unanswered, but only very good friends and very important—her husband preferred the word “necessary”—business associates had the High Barnegat number.
“Hello, Mrs. Trevayne?” had asked the deep voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes?”
“Frank Baldwin here. How are you, Phyllis?”
“Fine, just fine, Mr. Baldwin. And you?” Phyllis Trevayne had known Franklyn Baldwin for several years, but she still couldn’t bring herself to call the old gentleman by his first name. Baldwin was the last of a dying breed, one of the original giants of New York banking.
“I’d be a lot better if I knew why your husband hasn’t returned my calls. Is he all right? Not that I’m so important, God knows, but he’s not ill, is he?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. He’s been away from the office over a week now. He hasn’t taken any messages. I’m really to blame; I wanted him to rest.”
“My wife used to cover for me that way, too, young lady. Instinctively. Jumped right into the breach, and always with the right words.”
Phyllis Trevayne laughed pleasantly, aware of the compliment. “Really, it’s true, Mr. Baldwin. Right now the only reason I know he’s not working is that I can see the sail of the catamaran a mile or so off-shore.”
“A cat! God! I forget how young you are! In my day no one your age ever got so damned rich. Not by themselves.”
“We’re lucky. We never forget it.” Phyllis Trevayne’s voice spoke the truth.
“That’s a very nice thing to say, young lady.” Franklyn Baldwin also spoke the truth, and he wanted her to know that. “Well, when Captain Ahab bounds ashore, do ask him to call me, will you, please? It’s really most urgent.”
“I certainly shall.”
“Good-bye, my dear.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Baldwin.”
But her husband had been in touch with his office daily. He’d returned dozens of calls to far less important people than Franklyn Baldwin. Besides which, Andrew liked Baldwin: he’d said so a number of times. He’d gone to Baldwin on many occasions for guidance in the tangled webs of international finance.
Her husband owed a great deal to the banker, and now the old gentleman needed him. Why hadn’t Andrew returned the calls? It simply wasn’t like him.
The restaurant was small, seating no more than forty people, and situated on Thirty-eighth Street between Park and Madison avenues. Its clientele was generally from the ranks of the approaching-middleage executives with suddenly more money than they’d ever made before and a desire, a need, perhaps, to hold on to their younger outlooks. The food was only fair, its prices high, and the drinks were expensive. However, the bar area was wide, and the rich paneling ref
lected the soft, indirect lighting. The effect was a throwback to all those collegiate spots from the fifties that these drinkers remembered with such comfort.
It was designed precisely with that in mind.
Considering this, and he always considered it, the manager was slightly surprised to see a short, well-dressed man in his early sixties walk hesitantly through the door. The man looked around, adjusting his eyes to the dim light. The manager approached him.
“A table, sir?”
“No.… Yes, I’m meeting someone.… Never mind, thank you. We have one.”
The well-dressed man spotted the person he was looking for at a table in the rear. He walked abruptly away from the manager and sidled awkwardly past the crowded chairs.
The manager recalled the man at the rear table. He’d insisted on that particular table.
The elderly man sat down. “It might have been better to meet someplace other than a restaurant.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Allen. No one you know comes here.”
“I certainly hope you’re right.”
A waiter approached, and the order was given for drinks.
“I’m not so sure you should be concerned,” said the younger man. “It strikes me that I’m the one taking the risk, not you.”
“You’ll be taken care of; you know that. Let’s not waste time. Where do things stand?”
“The commission has unanimously approved Andrew Trevayne.”
“He won’t take it.”
“The feeling is that he will. Baldwin’s to make the offer; he may have done so already.”
“If he has, then you’re late.” The old man creased the flesh around his eyes and stared at the tablecloth. “We heard the rumors; we assumed they were a smokescreen. We relied on you.” He looked up at Webster. “It was our understanding that you would confirm the identity before any final action was taken.”
“I couldn’t control it; no one at the White House could. That commission’s off-limits. I was lucky to zero in on the name at all.”
“We’ll come back to that. Why do they think Trevayne will accept? Why should he? His Danforth Foundation is damn near as big as Ford or Rockefeller. Why would he give it up?” Allen asked.
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