The Bourne Supremacy (81 page)

'... Echo saw me in the woods. We used the old signals we used before, years ago. He hadn't forgotten. None of us ever forget.'

'Are we in the countryside, in the bird sanctuary, David?' asked Panov, gripping McAllister's shoulder to stop him from intruding.

'Yes,' replied Jason Bourne, his eyes now floating, unfocused. 'We both know. He's going to die. So simple, so clear. Die. Death. No more. Just buy time, precious minutes. Then maybe I can do it.'

'Do what - Delta?' Panov drew out the name in quiet emphasis.

'Take out the son of a bitch. Take out the butcher. He doesn't deserve to live, he has no right to live! He kills too easily - with a smile on his face. Echo saw it. I saw it. Now it's happening - everything's happening at once. The explosions in the forest, everybody running, shouting. I can do it now! He's a clean kill... He sees me! He's staring at me! He knows

I'm his enemy! I am your enemy, butcher! I'm the last face you'll see! ... What's wrong? Something's wrong! He's shielding himself! He's pulling someone in front of him. I have to get out! I can't do it!'

'Can't or won't," asked Panov, leaning forward. 'Are you Jason Bourne or are you David Webb? Who are you?'

'Delta!' screamed the victim, stunning everyone at the table by his outburst. 'I am Delta! I am Bourn! Cain is for Delta and Carlos is for Cain!' The victim, whoever he was, collapsed back in the chair, his head snapped down into his chest. He was silent.

It took several minutes - none knew how long, none counted until the man who was unable to establish an identity for himself raised his head. His eyes were now half free, half prisoner to the agony he was experiencing. 'I'm sorry,' said David Webb. 'I don't know what happened to me. I'm sorry.'

'No apologies, David,' said Panov. 'You went back. It's understandable. It's okay.'

'Yes, I went back. Screwy, isn't it?

'Not at all,' said the psychiatrist. 'It's perfectly natural.'

'1 have to go back, that's understandable, too, isn't it, Mo?'

'David!' screamed Marie, reaching for him.

'I have to,' said Jason Bourne, gently holding her wrists. 'No one else can do it, it's as simple as that. I know the codes. I know the way... Echo traded in his life for mine, believing I'd do it. I'd kill the butcher. I failed then. I won't fail now.'

'What about us?' Marie clutched him, her voice reverberating off the white walls. 'Don't we matter?'

'I'll come back, 1 promise you,' said David, removing her arms and looking into her eyes. 'But I have to go back, can't you understand?'

'For these people? These liars?

'No, not for them. For someone who wanted to live - above everything. You didn't know him; he was a survivor. But he knew when his life wasn't worth the price of my death. I had to live and do what I had to do. I had to live and come back to you, he knew that, too. He faced the equation and made his decision. Somewhere along the line we all have to make that decision.' Bourne turned to McAllister. 'Is there anyone here who can take a picture of a corpse?

'Whose?' asked the undersecretary of state.

'Mine,' said Jason Bourne.

34

The grisly photograph was taken on the white conference table by a sterile house technician under the reluctant supervision of Morris Panov. A bloodstained white sheet covered Webb's body; it was angled across his throat revealing a blood-streaked face, the eyes wide, the features clear.

'Develop the roll as fast as you can and bring me the contacts,' instructed Conklin.

Twenty minutes,' said the technician, heading for the door as McAllister entered the room.

'What's happening?' asked David, sitting up on the table. Marie, wincing, wiped his face with a warm, wet towel.

'The consulate press people called the media,' replied the undersecretary. 'They said they'd issue a statement in an hour or so, as soon as all the facts were in place. They're mocking one up now. I gave them the scenario with a go-ahead to use my name. They'll work it out with embassy obfuscation and read it to us before issuing it.'

'Any word on Lin?' asked the CIA man.

'A message from the doctor. He's still critical but holding on.'

'What about the press down the road?' asked Havilland. 'We've got to let them in here sooner or later. The longer we wait the more they'll think it's a cover-up. We can't afford that, either.'

'We've still got some rope in that area,' said McAllister. 'I sent word that the police - at great risks to themselves - were sweeping the grounds for undetonated explosives. Reporters can be very patient under those conditions. Incidentally, in the scenario I gave the press people, I told them to stress the fact that the man who attacked the house was obviously an expert in demolition.'

Jason Bourne, one of the most proficient demolitions men to come out of Medusa, looked at McAllister. The undersecretary looked away. 'I've got to get out of here,' Jason said. 'I've got to get to Macao as quickly as possible.' 'David, for God's sake!' Marie stood in front of her husband, staring at him, her voice low and intense.

'I wish it didn't have to be this way,' said Webb, getting off the table. 'I wish it didn't,' he repeated softly, 'but it does. I have to be in place. I have to start the sequence to reach Sheng before the story breaks in the morning papers, before that photograph appears confirming the message I'm sending through channels he's convinced no one knows about. He's got to believe I'm his assassin, the man he was going to kill, not the Jason Bourne from Medusa who tried to kill him in that forest glen. He has to get word from me - from who he thinks I am - before he's given any other information. Because the information I'm sending him is the last thing he wants to hear. Everything else will seem insignificant.'

'The bait,' said Alex Conklin. 'Feed him the critical information first and the cover falls in place because he's stunned, preoccupied, and accepts the printed official version, in particular the photograph in the newspapers.'

'What are you going to tell him?' asked the ambassador, his voice conveying the fact that he disliked the prospect of losing control of this blackest of operations. 'What you told me. Part truth, part lie.' 'Spell it out, Mr Webb,' said Havilland, firmly. 'We owe you a great deal but-'

'You owe me what you can't pay me!' snapped Jason Bourne, interrupting. 'Unless you blow your brains out right here in front of me.' 'I understand your anger but still I must insist. You'll do nothing to jeopardize the lives of five million people, or the vital interests of the United States government.'

'I'm glad you got the sequence right - for once. All right. Mr Ambassador, I'll tell you. It's what I would have told you before, if you'd had the decency, the decency, to come to me and "state your case". I'm surprised it never occurred to you -no, not surprised, shocked - but I guess I shouldn't be. You believe in your rarefied manipulations, in the trappings of your quiet power... you probably think you deserve it all because of your great intellect, or something like that. You're all the same. You relish complexity - and jour explanations of it - so that you can't see when the simple route is a hell of a lot more effective.'

'I'm waiting to be instructed,' said Havilland, coldly.

'So be it,' said Bourne. 'I listened very carefully during your ponderous explanation. You took pains to explain why no one could officially approach Sheng and tell him what you knew. You were right, too. He'd have laughed in your face, or spat in your eye, or told you to pound sand - whatever you like. Sure, he would. He's got the leverage. You pursue your "outrageous" accusations, he pulls Peking out of the Hong Kong Accords. You lose. You try to go over his head, good luck. You lose again. You have no proof but the words of several dead men who've had their throats cut, members of the Kuomintang who'd say anything to discredit party officials in the People's Republic. He smiles and, without saying it, lets you know that you'd better go along with him. You figure you can't go along because the risks are too great -if the whistle blows on Sheng, the Far East blows. You were right about that, too - more for the reasons Edward gave us than you did. Peking might possibly overlook a corrupt commission as one of those temporary concessions to greed, but it won't permit a spreading Chinese Mafia to infiltrate its industry or its labour forces or its government. As Edward said, they could lose their jobs-'

'I'm still waiting, Mr Webb,' said the diplomat.

'Okay. You recruited me but you forgot the lesson of Treadstone Seventy-one. Send out an assassin to catch an assassin.'

That's the one thing we did not forget,' broke in the diplomat, now astonished. 'We based everything on it.'

'For the wrong reasons,' said Bourne sharply. There was a better way to reach Sheng and draw him out for the kill. / wasn't necessary. My wife wasn't necessary! But you couldn't see it. Your superior brain had to complicate everything.'

'What was it I couldn't see, Mr Webb?

'Send in a conspirator to catch a conspirator, not officially ... It's too late for that now but it's what I would have told you.'

'I'm not sure you've told me anything.'

'Part truth, part lie - your own strategy. A courier is sent to Sheng, preferably a half-senile old man who's been paid by a blind and fed the information over the phone. No traceable source. He carries a verbal message, ears only, Sheng's only, nothing on paper. The message contains enough of the truth to paralyse Sheng. Let's say that the man sending it is someone in Hong Kong who stands to lose millions if Sheng's scheme falls apart, a man smart enough and frightened enough not to use his name. The message could allude to leaks, or traitors in the boardrooms, or excluded triads banding together because they've been cut out - all the things you're certain will happen. The truth. Sheng has to follow up, he can't afford not to. Contacts are made and a meeting is arranged. The Hong Kong conspirator is every bit as anxious to protect himself as Sheng, and every bit as leery, demanding a neutral meeting ground. It's set. It's the trap.' Bourne paused, glancing at McAllister. 'Even a third-rate demolitions grunt could show you how to carry it off.'

'Very quick and very professional,' said the ambassador. 'And with a glaring flaw. Where do we find such a conspirator in Hong Kong?

Jason Bourne studied the elder statesman, his expression bordering on contempt. 'You make him up,' he said. That's the lie.'

Havilland and Alex Conklin were alone in the white-walled room, each at either end of the conference table facing the other. McAllister and Morris Panov had gone to the undersecretary's office to listen on separate telephones to a mocked-up profile of an American killer created by the consulate for the benefit of the press. Panov had agreed to provide the appropriate psychiatric terminology with the correct Washington overtones. David Webb had asked to be alone with his wife until it was time to leave. They had been taken to a room upstairs; the fact that it was a bedroom had not occurred to anyone. It was merely a door to an empty room at the south side of the old Victorian house, away from the water-soaked men and ruins on the north side. Webb's departure had been estimated by McAllister to be in fifteen minutes or less. A car would drive Jason Bourne and the undersecretary to Kai Tak Airport. In the interest of speed and because the hydrofoils stopped running at 2100 hours, a medical helicopter would fly them to Macao, where all immigration permits would be cleared for the delivery of emergency supplies to the Kiang Wu Hospital on the Rua Coelho Do Amaral.

'It wouldn't have worked, you know,' said Havilland, looking over at Conklin.

'What wouldn't have?' asked the man from Langley, his own thoughts broken off by the diplomat's statement. 'What David told you?

'Sheng would never have agreed to a meeting with someone he didn't know, with someone who didn't identify himself.'

'It'd depend on how it was presented. That kind of thing always does. If the critical information is mind-blowing and the facts authentic, the subject doesn't have much of a choice. He can't question the messenger - he doesn't know anything -so he-has to go after the source. As Webb put it, he can't afford not to.'

'Webb? asked the ambassador flatly, his brows arched. 'Bourne, Delta. Who the hell knows? The strategy's sound.'

There are too many possible miscalculations, too many chances for a mis-step when one side invents a mythical party.'

Tell that to Jason Bourne.'

'Different circumstances. Treadstone had a willing agent provocateur to go after the Jackal. An obsessed man who chose extreme risk because he was trained for it and had lived with violence too long to let go. He didn't want to let go. There was no place else for him.'

'It's academic,' said Conklin, 'but I don't think you're in a position to argue with him. You sent him out with all the odds against him and he comes back with the assassin in tow - and he finds you. If he said it could be done another way, he's probably right and you can't say he isn't.'

'I can say, however,' said Havilland, resting his forearms on the table and fixing his eyes on the CIA man, 'that what we did really did work. We lost the assassin, but we gained a willing, even obsessed provocateur. From the beginning he was the optimum choice, but we never for a minute thought that he could be recruited to do the final job willingly by himself. Now he won't let anybody else do it; he's going back in, demanding his right to do it. So in the end we were right -1 was right. One sets the forces in motion, on a collision course, always watching, ready to abort, to kill, if one has to, but knowing that as the complications mount and the closer they come to each other's throat, the nearer the solution is. Ultimately - in their hatreds, their suspicions, their passions -they create their own violence, and the job is done. You may lose your own people but you have to weigh that loss against what it's worth to disrupt the enemy, to expose him.'

'You also risk exposing your own hand, the hand you insisted had to be kept out of sight.'

'How so?'

'Because it's not the end yet. Say Webb doesn't make it. Say he's caught, and you can bet your elegant ass the order will be to take him alive. When a man like Sheng sees that a trap is set to kill him, he'll want to know who's behind it. If pulling out a fingernail or ten doesn't do it - and it probably wouldn't -they'll needle him full of juice and find out where he comes from. He's heard everything you've told him-'