The Bourne Ultimatum

by Robert Ludlum

  Don’t bother me with such considerations! I have work to do.

  Where the hell is the men’s department? When he was finished making his purchases, all paid for in cash with as many different clerks as possible, he would find a men’s room where he would replace every stitch of clothing on his body. After that he would walk the streets of Washington until he found a hidden sewer grate. The Chameleon, too, was back.

  It was 7:35 in the evening when Bourne put down the single-edged razor blade. He had removed all the labels from the assortment of new clothes, hanging up each item in the closet when he had finished except for the shirts; these he steamed in the bathroom to remove the odor of newness. He crossed to the table, where room service had placed a bottle of Scotch whisky, club soda and a bucket of ice. As he passed the desk with the telephone he stopped; he wanted so terribly to call Marie on the island but knew he could not, not from the hotel room. That she and the children had arrived safely was all that mattered and they had; he had reached John St. Jacques from another pay phone in Garfinkel’s.

  “Hey, Davey, they’re bushed! They had to hang around the big island for damn near four hours until the weather cleared. I’ll wake Sis if you want me to, but after she fed Alison she just crashed.”

  “Never mind, I’ll call later. Tell her I’m fine and take care of them, Johnny.”

  “Will do, fella. Now you tell me. Are you okay?”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “Sure, you can say it and she can say it, but Marie’s not just my only sister, she’s my favorite sister, and I know when that lady’s shook up.”

  “That’s why you’re going to take care of her.”

  “I’m also going to have a talk with her.”

  “Go easy, Johnny.”

  For a few moments he had been David Webb again, mused Jason, pouring himself a drink. He did not like it; it felt wrong. An hour later, however, Jason Bourne was back. He had spoken to the clerk at the Mayflower about his reservation; the night manager had been summoned.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Simon,” the man had greeted him enthusiastically. “We understand you’re here to argue against those terrible tax restrictions on business travel and entertainment. Godspeed, as they say. These politicians will ruin us all!… There were no double rooms, so we took the liberty of providing you with a suite, no additional charge, of course.”

  All that had taken place over two hours ago, and since then he had removed the labels, steamed the shirts and scuffed the rubber-soled shoes on the hotel’s window ledge. Drink in hand, Bourne sat in a chair staring blankly at the wall; there was nothing to do but wait and think.

  A quiet tapping at the door ended the waiting in a matter of minutes. Jason walked rapidly across the room, opened the door and admitted the driver who had met him at the airport. The CIA man carried an attaché case; he handed it to Bourne.

  “Everything’s there, including a weapon and a box of shells.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to check it out?”

  “I’ll be doing that all night.”

  “It’s almost eight o’clock,” said the agent. “Your control will reach you around eleven. That’ll give you time to get started.”

  “My control …?”

  “That’s who he is, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, of course,” replied Jason softly. “I’d forgotten. Thanks again.”

  The man left and Bourne hurried to the desk with the attaché case. He opened it, removing first the automatic and the box of ammunition, then picking up what had to be several hundred computer printouts secured in file folders. Somewhere in those myriad pages was a name that linked a man or a woman to Carlos the Jackal. For these were the informational printouts of every guest currently at the hotel, including those who had checked out within the past twenty-four hours. Each printout was supplemented by whatever additional information was found in the data banks of the CIA, Army G-2 and naval intelligence. There could be a score of reasons why it might all be useless, but it was a place to start. The hunt had begun.

  Five hundred miles north, in another hotel suite, this on the third floor of Boston’s Ritz-Carlton, there was another tapping on another hotel door. Inside, an immensely tall man, whose well-tailored pin-striped suit made him appear even larger than his nearly six feet five inches of height, came rushing out of the bedroom. His bald head, fringed by perfectly groomed gray hair above his temples, was like the skull of an anointed éminence grise of some royal court where kings, princes and pretenders deferred to his wisdom, delivered no doubt with the eyes of an eagle and the soaring voice of a prophet. Although his rushing figure revealed a vulnerable anxiety, even that did not diminish his image of dominance. He was important and powerful and he knew it. All this was in contrast to the older man he admitted through the door. There was little that was distinguished about this short, gaunt, elderly visitor; instead, he conveyed the look of defeat.

  “Come in. Quickly! Did you bring the information?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, indeed,” answered the gray-faced man whose rumpled suit and ill-fitting collar had both seen better days perhaps a decade ago. “How grand you look, Randolph,” he continued in a thin voice while studying his host and glancing around at the opulent suite. “And how grand a place this is, so proper for such a distinguished professor.”

  “The information, please,” insisted Dr. Randolph Gates of Harvard, expert in antitrust law and highly paid consultant to numerous industries.

  “Oh, give me a moment, my old friend. It’s been a long time since I’ve been near a hotel suite, much less stayed in one.… Oh, how things have changed for us over the years. I read about you frequently and I’ve watched you on television. You’re so—erudite, Randolph, that’s the word, but it’s not enough. It’s what I said before—‘grand,’ that’s what you are, grand and erudite. So tall and imperious.”

  “You might have been in the same position, you know,” broke in the impatient Gates. “Unfortunately, you looked for shortcuts where there weren’t any.”

  “Oh, there were lots of them. I just chose the wrong ones.”

  “I gather things haven’t gone well for you—”

  “You don’t ‘gather,’ Randy, you know. If your spies didn’t inform you, certainly you can tell.”

  “I was simply trying to find you.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said on the phone, what a number of people said to me in the street—people who had been asked a number of questions having nothing to do with my residence, such as it is.”

  “I had to know if you were capable. You can’t fault me for that.”

  “Good heavens, no. Not considering what you had me do, what I think you had me do.”

  “Merely act as a confidential messenger, that’s all. You certainly can’t object to the money.”

  “Object?” said the visitor, with a high-pitched and tremulous laugh. “Let me tell you something, Randy. You can be disbarred at thirty or thirty-five and still get by, but when you’re disbarred at fifty and your trial is given national press along with a jail sentence, you’d be shocked at how your options disappear—even for a learned man. You become an untouchable, and I was never much good at selling anything but my wits. I proved that, too, over the last twenty-odd years, incidentally. Alger Hiss did better with greeting cards.”

  “I haven’t time to reminisce. The information, please.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.… Well, first the money was delivered to me on the corner of Commonwealth and Dartmouth, and naturally I wrote down the names and the specifics you gave me over the phone—”

  “Wrote down?” asked Gates sharply.

  “Burned as soon as I’d committed them to memory—I did learn a few things from my difficulties. I reached the engineer at the telephone company, who was overjoyed with your—excuse me—my largess, and took his information to that repulsive private detective, a sleaze if I ever saw one, Randy, and considering his methods, someone who could really use my talents.”
r />   “Please,” interrupted the renowned legal scholar. “The facts, not your appraisals.”

  “Appraisals often contain germane facts, Professor. Surely you understand that.”

  “If I want to build a case, I’ll ask for opinions. Not now. What did the man find out?”

  “Based on what you told me, a lone woman with children—how many being undetermined—and on the data provided by an underpaid telephone company mechanic, namely, a narrowed-down location based on the area code and the first three digits of a number, the unethical sleaze went to work at an outrageous hourly rate. To my astonishment, he was productive. As a matter of fact, with what’s left of my legal mind, we may form a quiet, unwritten partnership.”

  “Damn you, what did he learn?”

  “Well, as I say, his hourly rate was beyond belief, I mean it really invaded the corpus of my own well-deserved retainer, so I think we should discuss an adjustment, don’t you?”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? I sent you three thousand dollars! Five hundred for the telephone man and fifteen hundred for that miserable keyhole slime who calls himself a private detective—”

  “Only because he’s no longer on the public payroll of the police department, Randolph. Like me, he fell from grace, but he obviously does very good work. Do we negotiate or do I leave?”

  In fury, the balding imperious professor of law stared at the gray-faced old disbarred and dishonored attorney in front of him. “How dare you?”

  “Dear me, Randy, you really do believe your press, don’t you? Very well, I’ll tell why I dare, my arrogant old friend. I’ve read you, seen you, expounding on your esoteric interpretations of complex legal matters, assaulting every decent thing the courts of this country have decreed in the last thirty years, when you haven’t the vaguest idea what it is to be poor, or hungry, or have an unwanted mass in your belly you neither anticipated nor can provide a life for. You’re the darling of the royalists, my unprofound fellow, and you’d force the average citizen to live in a nation where privacy is obsolete, free thought suspended by censorship, the rich get richer, and for the poorest among us the beginnings of potential life itself may well have to be abandoned in order to survive. And you expound on these unoriginal, medieval concepts only to promote yourself as a brilliant maverick—of disaster. Do you want me to go on, Doctor Gates? Frankly, I think you chose the wrong loser to contact for your dirty work.”

  “How … dare you?” repeated the perplexed professor, sputtering as he regally strode to the window. “I don’t have to listen to this!”

  “No, you certainly don’t, Randy. But when I was an associate at the law school and you were one of my kids—one of the best but not the brightest—you damn well had to listen. So I suggest you listen now.”

  “What the hell do you want?” roared Gates, turning away from the window.

  “It’s what you want, isn’t it? The information you underpaid me for. It’s that important to you, isn’t it?”

  “I must have it.”

  “You were always filled with anxiety before an exam—”

  “Stop it! I paid. I demand the information.”

  “Then I must demand more money. Whoever’s paying you can afford it.”

  “Not a dollar!”

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  “Stop!… Five hundred more, that’s it.”

  “Five thousand or I go.”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “See you in another twenty years—”

  “All right.… All right, five thousand.”

  “Oh, Randy, you’re so obvious. It’s why you’re not really one of the brightest, just someone who can use language to make yourself appear bright, and I think we’ve seen and heard enough of that these days.… Ten thousand, Dr. Gates, or I go to the raucous bar of my choice.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Certainly I can. I’m now a confidential legal consultant. Ten thousand dollars. How do you want to pay it? I can’t imagine you have it with you, so how will you honor the debt—for the information?”

  “My word—”

  “Forget it, Randy.”

  “All right. I’ll have it sent to the Boston Five in the morning. In your name. A bank check.”

  “That’s very endearing of you. But in case it occurs to your superiors to stop me from collecting, please advise them that an unknown person, an old friend of mine in the streets, has a letter detailing everything that’s gone on between us. It is to be mailed to the Massachusetts Attorney General, Return Receipt Requested, in the event I have an accident.”

  “That’s absurd. The information, please.”

  “Yes, well, you should know that you’ve involved yourself in what appears to be an extremely sensitive government operation, that’s the bottom line.… On the assumption that anyone in an emergency leaving one place for another would do so with the fastest transportation possible, our rumbottom detective went to Logan Airport, under what guise I don’t know. Nevertheless, he succeeded in obtaining the manifests of every plane leaving Boston yesterday morning from the first flight at six-thirty to ten o’clock. As you recall, that corresponds with the parameters of your statement to me—‘leaving first thing in the morning.’ ”

  “And?”

  “Patience, Randolph. You told me not to write anything down, so I must take this step by step. Where was I?”

  “The manifests.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, according to Detective Sleaze, there were eleven unaccompanied children booked on various flights, and eight women, two of them nuns, who had reservations with minors. Of these eight, including the nuns who were taking nine orphans to California, the remaining six were identified as follows.” The old man reached into his pocket and shakily took out a typewritten sheet of paper. “Obviously, I did not write this. I don’t own a typewriter because I can’t type; it comes from Führer Sleaze.”

  “Let me have it!” ordered Gates, rushing forward, his hand outstretched.

  “Surely,” said the seventy-year-old disbarred attorney, giving the page to his former student. “It won’t do you much good, however,” he added. “Our Sleaze checked them out, more to inflate his hours than for anything else. Not only are they all squeaky clean, but he performed that unnecessary service after the real information was uncovered.”

  “What?” asked Gates, his attention diverted from the page. “What information?”

  “Information that neither Sleaze nor I would write down anywhere. The first hint of it came from the morning setup clerk for Pan American Airlines. He mentioned to our lowbrow detective that among his problems yesterday was a hotshot politician, or someone equally offensive, who needed diapers several minutes after our clerk went on duty at five-forty-five. Did you know that diapers come in sizes and are locked away in an airline’s contingency supplies?”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “All the stores in the airport were closed. They open at seven o’clock.”

  “So?”

  “So someone in a hurry forgot something. A lone woman with a five-year-old child and an infant were leaving Boston on a private jet taking off on the runway nearest the Pan Am shuttle counters. The clerk responded to the request and was personally thanked by the mother. You see, he’s a young father and understood about diaper sizes. He brought three different packages—”

  “For God’s sake, will you get to the point, Judge?”

  “Judge?” The gray-faced old man’s eyes widened. “Thank you, Randy. Except for my friends in various gin mills, I haven’t been called that in years. It must be the aura I exude.”

  “It was a throwback to that same boring circumlocution you used both on the bench and in the classroom!”

  “Impatience was always your weak suit. I ascribed it to your annoyance with other people’s points of view that interfered with your conclusions.… Regardless, our Major Sleaze knew a rotten apple when the worm emerged and spat in his face, so he hied himself off to Logan’s con
trol tower, where he found a bribable off-duty traffic controller who checked yesterday morning’s schedules. The jet in question had a computer readout of Four Zero, which to our Captain Sleaze’s astonishment he was told meant it was government-cleared and maximum-classified. No manifest, no names of anyone on board, only a routing to evade commercial aircraft and a destination.”

  “Which was?”

  “Blackburne, Montserrat.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The Blackburne Airport on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.”

  “That’s where they went? That’s it?”

  “Not necessarily. According to Corporal Sleaze, who I must say does his follow-ups, there are small flight connections to a dozen or so minor offshore islands.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it, Professor. And considering the fact that the aircraft in question had a Four Zero government classification, which, incidentally, in my letter to the attorney general I so specified, I think I’ve earned my ten thousand dollars.”

  “You drunken scum—”

  “Again you’re wrong, Randy,” interrupted the judge. “Alcoholic, certainly, drunk hardly ever. I stay on the edge of sobriety. It’s my one reason for living. You see in my cognizance I’m always amused—by men like you, actually.”

  “Get out of here,” said the professor ominously.

  “You’re not even going to offer me a drink to help support this dreadful habit of mine?… Good heavens, there must be half a dozen unopened bottles over there.”

  “Take one and leave.”

  “Thank you, I believe I will.” The old judge walked to a cherry-wood table against the wall where two silver trays held various whiskies and a brandy. “Let’s see,” he continued, picking up several white cloth napkins and wrapping them around two bottles, then a third. “If I hold these tightly under my arm, they could be a pile of laundry I’m taking out for quick service.”

  “Will you hurry!”

  “Will you please open the door for me? I’d hate like hell dropping one of these while manipulating the knob. If it smashed it wouldn’t do much for your image, either. You’ve never been known to have a drink, I believe.”