The Bourne Ultimatum

by Robert Ludlum

  “Yes, I know.”

  The brother looked at his sister. “That stranger you were talking about yesterday at the house?”

  “Yes, only now it’s worse. That’s why he’s frightened.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s older, Johnny. He’s fifty now and he wonders if he can still do the things he did before, years ago—in the war, in Paris, in Hong Kong. It’s all gnawing at him, eating into him, because he knows he’s got to be better than he ever was.”

  “I think he can be.”

  “I know he will be, for he has an extraordinary reason going for him. A wife and two children were taken from him once before. He barely remembers them, but they’re at the core of his torment; Mo Panov believes that and I do, too.… Now, years later, another wife and two children are threatened. Every nerve in him has to be on tire.”

  Suddenly, from three hundred feet away on the beach, Bourne’s voice erupted, splitting through the breezes from the sea. “Goddamn it, I told you to hurry!… And you, Mr. Expert, there’s a reef out here with the color of a sandbar beyond it! Have you considered that?”

  “Don’t answer, Johnny. We’ll go out to the plane.”

  “A sandbar? What the hell’s he talking about?… Oh, my God, I do see!”

  “I don’t,” said Marie as they walked rapidly up the pier.

  “There are reefs around eighty percent of the island, ninety-five percent where this beach is concerned. They brake the waves, it’s why it’s called Tranquility; there’s no surf at all.”

  “So what?”

  “So someone using a tank under water wouldn’t risk crashing into a reef, but he would into a sandbar in front of a reef. He could watch the beach and the guards and crawl up when his landing was clear, lying in the water only feet from shore until he could take the guard. I never thought about that.”

  “He did, Bro.”

  Bourne sat on the corner of the desk, the two old men on a couch in front of him, his brother-in-law standing by a window fronting the beach in the unoccupied villa.

  “Why would I—why would we—lie to you, monsieur?” asked the hero of France.

  “Because it all sounds like a classic French farce. Similar but different names; one door opening as another closes, look-alikes disappearing and entering on cue. It smells, gentlemen.”

  “Perhaps you are a student of Molière or Racine …?”

  “I’m a student of uncanny coincidence, especially where the Jackal is concerned.”

  “I don’t think there’s the slightest similarity in our appearances,” offered the judge from Boston. “Except, perhaps, our ages.”

  The telephone rang. Jason quickly reached down and picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Everything checks out in Boston,” said Conklin. “His name’s Prefontaine, Brendan Prefontaine. He was a federal judge of the first circuit caught in a government scam and convicted of felonious misconduct on the bench—read that as being very large in the bribery business. He was sentenced to twenty-one years and did ten, which was enough to blow him away in every department. He’s what they call a functioning alcoholic, something of a character in Bean Town’s shadier districts, but harmless—actually kind of liked in a warped sort of way. He’s also considered very bright when he’s clearheaded, and I’m told a lot of crumbs wouldn’t have gone court-free and others would be doing longer jail terms if he hadn’t given shrewd advice to their attorneys of record. You might say he’s a behind-the-scenes storefront lawyer, the ‘stores’ in his case being saloons, pool halls and probably warehouses.… Since I’ve been where he’s at in the booze terrain, he sounds straight arrow to me. He’s handling it better than I ever did.”

  “You quit.”

  “If I could have managed better in that twilight zone, I might not have. There’s something to be said for the grape on many occasions.”

  “What about his client?”

  “Awesome, and our once and former judge was an adjunct professor at Harvard Law, where Gates was a student in two of his classes. No question about it, Prefontaine knows the man.… Trust him, Jason. There’s no reason for him to lie. He was simply after a score.”

  “You’re following up on the client?”

  “With all the quiet ammunition I can pull out of my personal woodwork. He’s our link to Carlos.… The Medusa connection was a false lead, a stupid attempt by a stupid general in the Pentagon to put someone inside Gates’s inner legal circle.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I am now. Gates is a highly paid consultant to a law firm representing a megadefense contractor under antitrust scrutiny. He wouldn’t even return Swayne’s calls, which, if he did, would make him more stupid than Swayne, which he isn’t.”

  “That’s your problem, friend, not mine. If everything goes the way I intend it to go here, I don’t even want to hear about Snake Lady. In fact, I can’t remember ever having heard of it.”

  “Thanks for dumping it in my lap—and in a way I guess I mean that. Incidentally, the grammar-school notebook you grabbed from the gunslinger in Manassas has some interesting things in it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you remember those three frequent fliers from the Mayflower’s registry who flew into Philadelphia eight months ago and just happened to be at the hotel at the same time eight months later?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Their names are in Swayne’s Mickey Mouse loose-leaf. They had nothing to do with Carlos; they’re part of Medusa. It’s a mother lode of disconnected information.”

  “I’m not interested. Use it in good health.”

  “We will, and very quietly. That notebook’ll be on the most wanted list in a matter of days.”

  “I’m happy for you, but I’ve got work to do.”

  “And you refuse any help?”

  “Absolutely. This is what I’ve been waiting thirteen years for. It’s what I said at the beginning, it’s one on one.”

  “High Noon, you goddamn fool?”

  “No, the logical extension of a very intellectual chess game, the player with the better trap wins, and I’ve got that trap because I’m using his. He’d smell out any deviation.”

  “We trained you too well, scholar.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “Good hunting, Delta.”

  “Good-bye.” Bourne hung up the phone and looked over at the two pathetically curious old men on the couch. “You passed a sleaze-factored muster, Judge,” he said to Prefontaine. “And you, ‘Jean Pierre,’ what can I say? My own wife, who admits to me that you might very well have killed her without the slightest compunction, tells me that I have to trust you. Nothing makes a hell of a lot of sense, does it?”

  “I am what I am, and I did what I did,” said the disgraced attorney with dignity. “But my client has gone too far. His magisterial persona must come to an end in ashes.”

  “My words are not so well phrased as those of my learned, newfound relative,” added the aged hero of France. “But I know the killing must stop; it’s what my woman tried to tell me. I am a hypocrite, of course, for I am no stranger to killing, so I shall only say that this kind of killing must stop. There is no business arrangement here, no profit in the kill, only a sick madman’s vengeance that demands the unnecessary death of a mother and her children. Where is the profit there?… No, the Jackal has gone too far. He, too, must now be stopped.”

  “That’s the most cold-blooded fucking reasoning I’ve ever heard!” cried John St. Jacques by the window.

  “I thought your words were very well chosen,” said the former judge to the felon from Paris. “Très bien.”

  “D’accord.”

  “And I think I’m out of my mind to have anything to do with either of you,” broke in Jason Bourne. “But right now I don’t have a choice.… It’s eleven-thirty-five, gentlemen. The clock is running.”

  “The what?” asked Prefontaine.

  “Whatever’s going to happen will happen during t
he next two, five, ten or twenty-four hours. I’m flying back to Blackburne Airport, where I’ll create a scene, the bereaved husband and father who’s gone crazy over the killing of his wife and children. It won’t be difficult for me, I assure you; I’ll make a hell of a ruckus.… I’ll demand an immediate flight to Tranquility, and when I get here there’ll be three pine coffins on the pier, supposedly containing my wife and children.”

  “Everything as it should be,” interrupted the Frenchman. “Bien.”

  “Very bien,” agreed Bourne. “I’ll insist that one be opened, and then I’ll scream or collapse or both, whatever comes to mind, so that whoever’s watching won’t forget what they’ve seen. St. Jacques here will have to control me—be rough, Johnny, be convincing—and finally I’ll be taken up to another villa, the one nearest the steps to the beach on the east path.… Then the waiting begins.”

  “For this Jackal?” asked the Bostonian. “He’ll know where you are?”

  “Of course he will. A lot of people, including the staff, will have seen where I was taken. He’ll find out, that’s child’s play for him.”

  “So you wait for him, monsieur? You think the monseigneur will walk into such a trap? Ridicule!”

  “Not at all, monsieur,” replied Jason calmly. “To begin with, I won’t be there, and by the time he finds that out, I’ll have found him.”

  “For Christ’s sake, how?” half shouted St. Jacques.

  “Because I’m better than he is,” answered Jason Bourne. “I always was.”

  The scenario went as planned, the personnel at Montserrat’s Blackburne Airport still smoldering from the abuse hurled at them by the tall hysterical American who accused them all of murder, of allowing his wife and children to be killed by terrorists—of being willing nigger accomplices of filthy killers! Not only were the people of the island quietly furious, but they were also hurt. Quiet because they understood his anguish, hurt because they could not understand how he could blame them and use such vicious words, words he had never used before. Was this good mon, this wealthy brother of the gregarious Johnny Saint Jay, this rich-rich friend who had put so much money into Tranquility Isle not a friend at all but, instead, white garbage who blamed them for terrible things they had nothing to do with because their skins were dark? It was an evil puzzle, mon. It was part of the madness, the obeah that had crossed the waters from the mountains of Jamaic’ and put a curse on their islands. Watch him, brothers. Watch his every move. Perhaps he is another sort of storm, one not born in the south or the east, but whose winds are more destructive. Watch him, mon. His anger is dangerous.

  So he was watched. By many—the uninformed, civilians and authorities alike—as a nervous Henry Sykes at Government House kept his word. The official investigation was solely under his command. It was quiet, thorough—and nonexistent.

  Bourne behaved far worse on the pier of Tranquility Inn, striking his own brother, the amiable Saint Jay, until the younger man subdued him and had him carried up the steps to the nearest villa. Servants came and went bringing trays of food and drink to the porch. Selected visitors were permitted to pay their condolences, including the chief aide to the Crown governor who wore his full military regalia, a symbol of the Crown’s concern. And an old man who knew death from the brutalities of war and who insisted on seeing the bereaved husband and father—he was accompanied by a woman in a nurse’s uniform, properly topped by a hat and a dark mourning veil. And two Canadian guests of the hotel, close friends of the owner, both of whom had met the disconsolate man when Tranquility Inn opened with great fireworks several years ago—they asked to pay their respects and offer whatever support or comfort they could. John St. Jacques agreed, suggesting that their visit be brief and to understand that his brother-in-law remained in a corner of the darkened living room, the drapes having been drawn.

  “It’s all so horrible, so meaningless!” said the visitor from Toronto softly to the shadowed figure in a chair across the room. “I hope you’re a religious man, David. I am. Faith helps in such times as these. Your loved ones are in the arms of Christ now.”

  “Thank you.” A momentary breeze off the water rustled the drapes, permitting a narrow shaft of sunlight to flash across the room. It was enough.

  “Wait a minute,” said the second Canadian. “You’re not—good Lord, you’re not Dave Webb! Dave has—”

  “Be quiet,” ordered St. Jacques, standing at the door behind the two visitors.

  “Johnny, I spent seven hours in a fishing boat with Dave and I damn well know him when I see him!”

  “Shut up,” said the owner of Tranquility Inn.

  “Oh, dear God!” cried the aide to the Crown governor of Montserrat in a clipped British accent.

  “Listen to me, both of you,” said St. Jacques, rushing forward between the two Canadians and turning to stand in front of the armchair. “I wish I’d never let you in here, but there’s nothing we can do about that now.… I thought you’d add weight, two more observers, if anyone asked you questions, which they will, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do. You’ve been talking to David Webb, consoling David Webb. Do you understand that?”

  “I don’t understand a damn thing,” objected the bewildered visitor who had spoken of the comfort of faith. “Who the hell is he?”

  “He’s the senior aide to the Crown governor,” answered St. Jacques. “I’m telling you this so you will understand—”

  “You mean the army brass who showed up in full uniform with a squad of black soldiers?” asked the guest who had fished with David Webb.

  “Among his duties is chief military aide-de-camp. He’s a brigadier—”

  “We saw the bastard leave,” protested the fisherman. “From the dining room, we all saw him leave! He was with the old Frenchman and the nurse—”

  “You saw someone else leave. Wearing sunglasses.”

  “Webb …?”

  “Gentlemen!” The governor’s aide rose from the chair, wearing the ill-fitting jacket worn by Jason Bourne when he had flown back to Tranquility from Blackburne Airport. “You are welcome guests on our island but, as guests, you will abide by the Crown’s decisions in emergencies. You will either abide by them, or, as we would do in extreme weather, we will be forced to place you in custody.”

  “Hey, come on, Henry. They’re friends.…”

  “Friends do not call brigadiers ‘bastards’—”

  “You might if you were once a busted corporal, General,” inserted the man of faith. “My companion here didn’t mean anything. Long before the whole damned Canadian army needed his company’s engineers, he was a screwed-up infantry grunt. His company, incidentally. He wasn’t too bright in Korea.”

  “Let’s cut the crap,” said Webb’s fishing companion. “So we’ve been in here talking to Dave, right?”

  “Right. And that’s all I can tell you.”

  “It’s enough, Johnny. Dave’s in trouble, so what can we do?”

  “Nothing—absolutely nothing but what’s on the inn’s agenda. You all got a copy delivered to your villas an hour ago.”

  “You’d better explain,” said the religious Canadian. “I never read those goddamn happy-hour schedules.”

  “The inn’s having a special buffet, everything on the house, and a meteorologist from the Leeward Islands Weather Control will speak for a few minutes on what happened last night.”

  “The storm?” asked the fisherman, the former busted corporal and current owner of Canada’s largest industrial engineering company. “A storm’s a storm in these islands. What’s to explain?”

  “Oh, things like why they happen and why they’re over so quickly; how to behave—the elimination of fear, basically.”

  “You want us all up there, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’ll help Dave?”

  “Yes, it will.”

  “Then the whole place’ll be up there. I guarantee it.”

  “I appreciate that, but how c
an you?”

  “I’ll circulate another happy-hour notice that Angus MacPherson McLeod, chairman of All Canada Engineering, will award ten thousand dollars to whoever asks the most intelligent question. How about that, Johnny? The rich always want more for nothing, that’s our profound weakness.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” mumbled St. Jacques.

  “C’mon,” said McLeod to his religious friend from Toronto. “We’ll circulate with tears in our eyes and spread the word. Then, you idiot colonel—that’s what you were, y’ bastard—in an hour or so we’ll shift gears and only talk of ten thousand dollars and a free-for-all dinner. With the beach and the sun, people’s attention spans are roughly two and a half minutes; in cold weather, no more than four. Believe me, I’ve had it calculated by computer research.… You’ll have a full party tonight, Johnny.” McLeod turned and walked toward the door.

  “Scotty,” cried the man of faith following the fisherman. “You’re going off half-cocked again! Attention spans, two minutes, four minutes, computer research—I don’t believe a word of it!”

  “Really?” said Angus, his hand on the knob. “You believe in ten thousand dollars, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “You watch, that’s my market research.… That’s also why I own the company. And now I intend to summon those tears to my eyes; it’s another reason I own the company.”

  In a dark storage room on the third floor of Tranquility Inn’s main complex, Bourne, who had shed the military tunic, and the old Frenchman sat on two stools in front of a window overlooking the east and west paths of the shoreline resort. The villas below extended out on both sides of the stone steps leading down to the beach and the dock. Each man held a pair of powerful binoculars to his eyes, scanning the people walking back and forth on the paths and up and down the rock staircase. A handheld radio with the hotel’s private frequency was on the sill in front of Jason.

  “He’s near us,” said Fontaine softly.

  “What?” shot out Bourne, yanking the glasses from his face and turning to the old man. “Where? Tell me where!”

  “He’s not in our vision, monsieur, but he is near us.”