The Bourne Ultimatum

by Robert Ludlum

  “Which one?” asked Bourne.

  “One you’ve never heard of, funded privately a few years ago by wealthy close friends of the august ‘wealthy’ general. It’s as touching as can be. It goes under the title of the Soldiers, Sailors and Marines Retreat; the board of directors is already in place.”

  “Medusans.”

  “Or their surrogates. We’ll see.”

  “Alex, what about the names I gave you, the six or seven names Flannagan gave me? And that slew of license plate numbers from their meetings?”

  “Cute, real cute,” said Conklin enigmatically.

  “What’s cute?”

  “Take the names—they’re the dregs of the wing-ding social set, no relation to the Georgetown upper crust. They’re out of the National Enquirer, not The Washington Post.”

  “But the licenses, the meetings! That’s got to be the ball of wax.”

  “Even cuter,” observed Alex. “A ball of sheep dip.… Every one of those licenses is registered to a limousine company, read that companies. I don’t have to tell you how authentic the names would be even if we had the dates to trace them.”

  “There’s a cemetery out there!”

  “Where is it? How big, how small? There are twenty-eight acres—”

  “Start looking!”

  “And advertise what we know?”

  “You’re right; you’re playing it right.… Alex, tell Holland you couldn’t reach me.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, I mean it. I’ve got the concierge, I can cover. Give Holland the hotel and the name and tell him to call himself, or send over whoever he likes from the embassy to verify. The concierge will swear I checked in yesterday and he hasn’t seen me since. Even the switchboard will confirm it. Buy me a few days, please.”

  “Holland could still pull all the plugs and probably will.”

  “He won’t if he thinks I’ll come back when you find me. I just want him to keep looking for Mo and keep my name out of Paris. Good or bad, no Webb, no Simon, no Bourne!”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Was there anything else? I’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Yes. Casset is flying over to Brussels in the morning. He’s going to nail Teagarten—him we can’t allow and it won’t touch you.”

  “Agreed.”

  On a side street in Anderlecht, three miles south of Brussels, a military sedan bearing the flags of a four-star general officer pulled up to the curb in front of a sidewalk café. General James Teagarten, commander of NATO, his tunic emblazoned with five rows of ribbons, stepped gingerly out of the car into the bright early afternoon sunlight. He turned and offered his hand to a stunning WAC major, who smiled her thanks as she climbed out after him. Gallantly, with military authority, Teagarten released the woman’s hand and took her elbow; he escorted her across the wide pavement toward a cluster of umbrella-topped tables behind a row of flowering planter boxes that was the alfresco section of the café. They reached the entrance, a latticework archway profusely covered with baby roses, and walked inside. All the tables were occupied save one at the far end of the enclosed pavement; the hum of luncheon conversation was punctuated by the tinkling of wine bottles gently touching wineglasses and the delicate clatter of utensils lowered on china plates. The decibel level of the conversation was suddenly reduced, and the general, aware that his presence inevitably brought stares, amiable waves and not infrequently mild applause, smiled benignly at no one in particular and yet at everyone as he guided his lady to the deserted table where a small folded card read Réservé.

  The owner, with two waiters trailing behind him like anxious egrets, practically flew between the tables to greet his distinguished guest. When the commander was seated, a chilled bottle of Corton-Charlemagne was presented and the menu discussed. A young Belgian child, a boy of five or six, walked shyly up to the table and brought his hand to his forehead; he smiled and saluted the general. Teagarten rose to his feet, standing erect, and saluted the child back.

  “Vous êtes un soldat distingué, mon camarade,” said the general, his commanding voice ringing through the sidewalk café, his bright smile winning the crowd, who responded with appreciative applause. The child retreated and the meal continued.

  A leisurely hour later, Teagarten and his lady were interrupted by the general’s chauffeur, a middle-aged army sergeant whose expression conveyed his anxiety. The commander of NATO had received an urgent message over his vehicle’s secure phone, and the chauffeur had had the presence of mind to write it down and repeat it for accuracy. He handed Teagarten the note.

  The general stood up, his tanned face turning pale as he glanced around the now-half-empty sidewalk café, his eyes narrowed, angry, afraid. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded wad of Belgian franc notes, peeled off several large ones and dropped them on the table. “Come on,” he said to the woman major. “Let’s go.… You”—he turned to his driver—“get the car started!”

  “What is it?” asked his luncheon companion.

  “London. Over the wire. Armbruster and DeSole are dead.”

  “Oh, my God! How?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whatever they say is a lie.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. I just know we’re getting out of here. Come on!”

  The general and his lady rushed through the latticework archway, across the wide pavement and into the military vehicle. On either side of the hood, something was missing. The middle-aged sergeant had removed the two red-and-gold flags denoting the impressive rank of his superior, the commander of NATO. The car shot forward, traveling less than fifty yards when it happened.

  A massive explosion blew the military vehicle into the sky, shards of glass and metal, pieces of flesh and streaks of blood filling the narrow street in Anderlecht.

  “Monsieur!” cried the petrified waiter as crews of police, firemen and sanitation workers went about their grisly business in the road.

  “What is it?” replied the distraught owner of the sidewalk café, still shaking from the harsh interrogation he had gone through by the police and the descending hordes of journalists. “I am ruined. We will be known as the Café de la Mort, the restaurant of death.”

  “Monsieur, look!” The waiter pointed at the table where the general and his lady had sat.

  “The police have gone over it,” said the disconsolate owner.

  “No, monsieur. Now!”

  Across the glass top of the table, the capital letters scrawled in glistening red lipstick, was a name.

  JASON BOURNE

  20

  Stunned, Marie stared at the television set, at the satellite news program beamed from Miami. Then she screamed as a camera moved in on a glass table in a town called Anderlecht in Belgium and the name printed in red across the top. “Johnny!”

  St. Jacques burst through the bedroom door of the suite he had built for himself on the second floor of Tranquility Inn. “Christ, what is it?”

  Tears streaming down her face, Marie pointed in horror at the set. The announcer on the overseas “feed” was speaking in the monotonic drone peculiar to such satellite transmissions.

  “… as if a bloodstained savage from the past had returned to terrorize civilized society. The infamous killer, Jason Bourne, second only to Carlos the Jackal in the assassin-for-hire market, has claimed responsibility for the explosion that took the lives of General James Teagarten and his companions. Conflicting reports have come from Washington and London intelligence circles and police authorities. Sources in Washington claim that the assassin known as Jason Bourne was hunted down and killed in Hong Kong five years ago in a joint British-American operation. However, spokesmen for both the Foreign Office and British intelligence deny any knowledge of such an operation and say that a joint effort as was described is highly unlikely. Still other sources, these from Interpol’s headquarters in Paris, have stated that their branch in Hong Kong knew of the supposed death of Jason Bourne, but as th
e widely circulated reports and photographs were so sketchy and unidentifiable, they did not give much credence to the story. They assumed, as was also reported, that Bourne disappeared into the People’s Republic of China for a last contract fatal to himself. All that’s clear today is that in the quaint city of Anderlecht in Belgium, General James Teagarten, commander of NATO, was assassinated and someone calling himself Jason Bourne has taken credit for killing this great and popular soldier.… We now show you an old composite photograph from Interpol’s files produced by a consensus of those who purportedly had seen Bourne at close range. Remember, this is a composite, the features put together separately from scores of other photographs and, considering the killer’s reputation for changing his appearance, probably not of great value.”

  The screen was suddenly filled with the face of a man, some-what irregular and lacking definition.

  “It’s not David!” said John St. Jacques.

  “It could be, Bro,” said his sister.

  “And now to other news. The drought that has plagued large areas of Ethiopia—”

  “Turn that goddamned thing off!” shouted Marie, lurching out of the chair and heading for the telephone as her brother switched off the set. “Where’s Conklin’s number? I wrote it down here on your desk somewhere.… Here it is, on the blotter. Saint Alex has a hell of a lot to explain, that son of a bitch!” She dialed angrily but accurately, sitting in St. Jacques’s chair, tapping her clenched fist as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. Tears of sorrow and fury. “It’s me, you bastard!… You’ve killed him! You let him go—helped him to go—and you’ve killed him!”

  “I can’t talk to you now, Marie,” said a cold, controlled Alexander Conklin. “I’ve got Paris on the other line.”

  “Screw Paris! Where is he? Get him out!”

  “Believe me, we’re trying to find him. All fucking hell has broken out here. The British want Peter Holland’s ass for even hinting at a Far East connection, and the French are in an uproar over something they can’t figure out but suspect, like special Deuxième cargo on a plane from Martinique, which was originally rejected. I’ll call you back, I swear it!”

  The line was disconnected, and Marie slammed down the phone. “I’m flying to Paris, Johnny,” she said, breathing deeply and wiping the tears from her face.

  “You’re what?”

  “You heard me. Bring Mrs. Cooper over here. Jamie loves her and she’s better with Alison than I could ever be—and why not? She’s had seven children, all grown up who still come back to her every Sunday.”

  “You’re crazy! I won’t let you!”

  “Somehow,” said Marie, giving her brother a withering look, “I have an idea you probably said something like that to David when he told you he was going to Paris.”

  “Yes, I did!”

  “And you couldn’t stop him any more than you can stop me.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I know every place he knows in Paris, every street, every café, every alley, from Sacré-Coeur to Montmartre. He has to use them, and I’ll find him long before the Deuxième or the Sûreté.” The telephone rang; Marie picked it up.

  “I told you I’d call you right back,” said the voice of Alex Conklin. “Bernardine has an idea that might work.”

  “Who’s Bernardine?”

  “An old Deuxième colleague and a good friend who’s helping David.”

  “What’s his idea?”

  “He got Jason—David—a rental car. He knows the license-plate number and is having it radioed to all the Paris police patrols to report it if seen, but not to stop the car or harass the driver. Simply keep it in sight and report directly to him.”

  And you think David—Jason—won’t spot something like that? You’ve got a terrible memory, worse than my husband’s.”

  “It’s only one possibility, there are others.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well … well, he’s bound to call me. When he hears the news about Teagarten, he’s got to call me.”

  “Why?”

  “Like you say, to get him out!”

  “With Carlos in the offing? Fat chance, fathead. I’ve got a better idea. I’m flying to Paris.”

  “You can’t!”

  “I don’t want to hear that anymore, I won’t hear that anymore. Are you going to help me or do I do it by myself?”

  “I couldn’t get a postage stamp from a dispensing machine in France, and Holland couldn’t get the address of the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Then I’m on my own, which, frankly, under the circumstances, makes me feel a lot safer.”

  “What can you do, Marie?”

  “I won’t give you a litany, but I can go to all those places he and I went to, used when we were running. He’ll use them again, somehow, some way. He has to because in your crazy jargon they were ‘secure,’ and in his crazy frame of mind he’ll return to them because he knows they’re secure.”

  “God bless, favorite lady.”

  “He abandoned us, Alex. God doesn’t exist.”

  Prefontaine walked through the terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport to the crowded platform and raised his hand to hail a cab. But after looking around, he lowered his hand and stood in line; things had changed in thirty years. Everything, including airports, had become cafeterias; one stood in line for a plate of third-rate mulligan stew, as well as for a taxi.

  “The Ritz-Carlton,” said the judge to the driver.

  “You h’ain’d got no luggage?” asked the man. “Nudding but d’liddle bag?”

  “No, I do not,” replied Prefontaine and, unable to resist a follow-up added, “I keep wardrobes wherever I go.”

  “Tutti-fruitee,” said the driver, removing an outsized, wide-toothed comb from his hair as he swung out into the traffic.

  “You have a reservation, sir?” asked the tuxedoed clerk behind the counter at the Ritz.

  “I trust one of my law clerks made it for me. The name’s Scofield, Justice William Scofield of the Supreme Court. I’d hate to think that the Ritz had lost a reservation, especially these days when everyone’s screaming for consumer protection.”

  “Justice Scofield …? I’m sure it’s here somewhere, sir.”

  “I specifically requested Suite Three-C, I’m sure it’s in your computer.”

  “Three-C … it’s booked—”

  “What?”

  “No, no, I’m wrong, Mr. Justice. They haven’t arrived … I mean it’s an error … they’re in another suite.” The clerk pounded his bell with ferocity. “Bellboy, bellboy!”

  “No need for that, young fella, I travel light. Just give me the key and point me in the right direction.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I trust you’ve got a few bottles of decent whisky up there, as usual?”

  “If they’re not, they will be, Mr. Justice. Any particular brands?”

  “Good rye, good bourbon and good brandy. The white stuff is for sissies, right?”

  “Right, sir. Right away, sir!”

  Twenty minutes later, his face washed and a drink in his hand, Prefontaine picked up the phone and dialed Dr. Randolph Gates.

  “The Gates residence,” said the woman on the line.

  “Oh, come on, Edie, I’d know your voice under water and it’s been almost thirty years.”

  “I know yours, too, but I simply can’t place it.”

  “Try a rough adjunct professor at the law school who kept beating the hell out of your husband, which made no impression upon him and he was probably right because I ended up in jail. The first of the local judges to be put away, and rightfully so.”

  “Brendan? Dear God, it’s you! I never believed all those things they said about you.”

  “Believe, my sweet, they were true. But right now I have to speak to the lord of the Gates. Is he there?”

  “I suppose he is, I don’t really know. He doesn’t speak to me very much anymore.”

  “Things are not well, my dear?”
/>   “I’d love to talk to you, Brendan. He’s got a problem, a problem I never knew about.”

  “I suspect he has, Edie, and of course we’ll talk. But at the moment I have to speak with him. Right now.”

  “I’ll call him on the intercom.”

  “Don’t tell him it’s me, Edith. Tell him it’s a man named Blackburne from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean.”

  “What?”

  “Do as I say, dear Edie. It’s for his sake as well as yours—perhaps more for you, if truth were told.”

  “He’s sick, Brendan.”

  “Yes, he is. Let’s try to make him well. Get him on the line for me.”

  “I’ll put you on hold.”

  The silence was interminable, the two minutes more like two hours until the graveled voice of Randolph Gates exploded on the line. “Who are you?” whispered the celebrated attorney.

  “Relax, Randy, it’s Brendan. Edith didn’t recognize my voice, but I sure remembered hers. You’re one lucky fellow.”

  “What do you want? What’s this about Montserrat?”

  “Well, I just came back from there—”

  “You what?”

  “I decided I needed a vacation.”

  “You didn’t …!” Gates’s whisper was now essentially a cry of panic.

  “Oh, but I did, and because I did your whole life is going to change. You see, I ran into the woman and her two children that you were so interested in, remember them? It’s quite a story and I want to tell it to you in all its fascinating detail.… You set them up to be killed, Dandy Randy, and that’s a no-no. A dreadful no-no.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve never heard of Montserrat or any woman with two children. You’re a desperate sniveling drunk and I’ll deny your insane allegations as the alcoholic fantasies of a convicted felon!”

  “Well done, Counselor. But denying any allegations made by me isn’t the core of your dilemma. No, that’s in Paris.”

  “Paris …?”

  “A certain man in Paris, someone I didn’t realize was a living person, but I learned otherwise. It’s somewhat murky how it came about, but a strange thing happened in Montserrat. I was mistaken for you.”