“Number one with a bullet, I shouldn’t think. Where should we meet?”
Bourne told him.
“Good enough. Yo, listen, Jason.” Deron’s tone was abruptly more somber. “That must have been tough. I mean, you saw them, didn’t you?”
Bourne stared at his plate. Why had he ordered this sandwich? The tomato had a raw and bloody look. “I saw them, yes.” What if he could somehow roll back time, make Alex and Mo reappear? That would be quite a trick. But the past stayed the past, receding further from memory with every day.
“It’s not like Butch Cassidy.”
Bourne did not say a word.
Deron sighed. “I knew Alex and Mo, too.”
“Of course you did. I introduced you,” Bourne said, as he closed the phone.
He sat at the table for a while, thinking. Something was bothering him. An alarm bell had gone off in his head as he had exited the men’s room, but he had been distracted by his conversation with Deron and so he had not taken full note of it. What was it? Slowly, carefully, he scanned the room again. Then he had it. He did not see the man with the beard and slight limp. Perhaps he had finished his meal and had been on his way out. On the other hand, his presence in the men’s room had made Bourne distinctly uneasy. There was something about him….
He threw some money onto the table and went to the front of the restaurant. The two windows that looked out onto the street were separated by a wide mahogany pillar. Bourne stood behind it, using it as a screen while he checked the street. Pedestrians were first—anyone walking at an unnaturally slow pace, anyone loitering, reading a newspaper, standing too long in front of the shop window directly across the street, possibly scanning it for the reflection of the restaurant’s entrance. He saw nothing suspicious. He marked three people sitting inside parked cars—one woman, two men. He could not see their faces. And then, of course, there were the cars parked on the restaurant side of the street.
Without a second thought, he went out onto the street. It was late morning and the crowd was denser now. That suited his current needs. He spent the next twenty minutes surveilling his immediate environment, checking doorways, storefronts, passing pedestrians and vehicles, windows and rooftops. When he’d satisfied himself that the field contained no Agency suits, he crossed the street, went into a liquor store. He asked for a bottle of the Speyside sherry-cask single-malt that had been Conklin’s drink. While the proprietor went to fetch it, he looked out the window. No one in any of the cars parked on the restaurant side of the street. As he watched, one of the men he had noted got out of his car, went into a pharmacy. He had neither a beard nor a limp.
He had nearly two hours before he had to meet Deron, and he wanted to use the time productively. The memory of the Paris office, the voice, the half-remembered face that had been pushed aside by the exigencies of current circumstance, had now returned. According to Mo Panov’s methodology, he needed to inhale the Scotch again in order to pull out more of the memory. In this way, he hoped to try to find out who the man in Paris was and why the particular memory of him had surfaced now. Had it been simply the scent of the single-malt, or was it something in his current predicament that had provoked it?
Bourne paid for the Scotch with a credit card, feeling he was safe enough using it in a liquor store. A moment later, he exited the store with his package. He passed the car with the woman inside. A small child was sitting next to her in the passenger’s seat. Since the Agency would never allow a child to be used on an active field surveillance, that left the second man as a possibility. Bourne turned, walking away from the car in which the man sat. He did not look behind him, did not try to use any covert methods of spying or the standard procedures for shaking a tail. He did keep track of all the cars immediately in front and behind him, however.
Within ten minutes, he had reached a park. He sat down on a wrought-iron bench, watched the pigeons rise and fall, wheeling against the blue sky overhead. The other benches were perhaps half-full. An old man came into the park; he held a brown bag as crumpled as his face from which he extracted handfuls of bread crumbs. The pigeons, it seemed, had been expecting him, for they swooped down, swirling around him, cooing and clucking in delight as they gorged themselves.
Bourne opened the bottle of single-malt, sniffed its elegant and complex aroma. Immediately, Alex’s face flashed before him, and the slow creep of blood over the floor. Gently, almost reverently, he set this image aside. He took a small sip of the Scotch, holding it on his palate, allowing the fumes to rise up into his nose, to bring him back to the shard of memory he was finding so elusive. In his mind’s eye, he saw again the view out onto the Champs-Elysées. He was holding the cut-crystal glass in his hand, and as he took another sip of the Scotch, he willed himself to bring the glass to his lips. He heard the strong, operatic voice, willed himself to turn back into the Paris office where he had been standing an unknown time ago.
Now, for the first time, he could see the plush appointments of the room, the painting by Raoul Dufy of an elegant horse and rider in the Bois de Boulogne, the dark green walls with their deep luster, the high cream ceiling etched in the clear, piercing light of Paris. Go on, he urged himself. Go on…. A patterned carpet, two high-backed upholstered chairs, a heavy polished walnut desk in the Regency style of Louis XIV, behind which stood, smiling, a tall, handsome man with worldly eyes, a long Gallic nose and prematurely white hair. Jacques Robbinet, French Minister of Culture.
That was it! How Bourne knew him, why they had become friends and, in a sense, compatriots, was still a mystery, but at least now he knew that he had an ally he could contact and count on. Elated, Bourne put the Scotch bottle underneath the bench, a gift for the first vagrant who noticed it. He looked around without seeming to. The old man had gone and so had most of the pigeons; just a few of the largest ones, chests puffed out to protect their territory, were strutting around, scrounging the last of the crumbs. A young couple were kissing on a nearby bench; three kids with a boombox passed through, made lewd noises at the snuggled couple. His senses were on high alert—something was wrong, out of place, but he could not figure out what it was.
He was keenly aware that the deadline to meet Deron was fast approaching, but instinct warned him not to move until he had identified the anomaly. He looked again at all the people in the park. No bearded man, certainly none with a limp. And yet…Diagonally across from him was a man sitting forward, elbows on knees, hands together. He was watching a young boy whose father had just handed him an ice cream cone. What interested Bourne was that he was dressed in a dark suede bomber jacket and black slacks. His hair was black, not gray, he had no beard, and by the normal way his legs were bent, Bourne was certain that he didn’t have a limp.
Bourne, himself a chameleon, an expert in disguise, knew that one of the best methods of keeping hidden was to change your gait, especially if one was trying to hide from a professional. An amateur might notice superficial aspects such as hair color and clothes, but to a trained agent the way you moved and walked was as individual as a fingerprint. He tried to bring up the image of the man in the restaurant men’s room. Had he been wearing a wig and fake beard? Bourne couldn’t be sure. What he was certain of, though, was that the man had been wearing a dark suede bomber jacket and black slacks. From this position he couldn’t see the man’s face, but it was clear that he was far younger than the man in the men’s room had appeared.
There was something else about him, but what was it? He studied the side of the man’s face for several moments before he had it. A flash image of the man who’d jumped him in the woods of Conklin’s estate came to him. It was the shape of the ear, the deep brownish color, the configuration of the whorls.
Good God, the thought, abruptly disoriented, this was the man who’d shot at him, who’d almost succeeded in killing him in the Manassas cave! How had he trailed Bourne all the way from there when Bourne had given the slip to every Agency and state trooper in the area? He felt a momentary chill run thr
ough him. What kind of man could do that?
He knew there was only one way to find out. Experience told him that when you are up against a formidable foe the only way to get a true measure of him is to do the last thing he would expect. Still, for a moment, he hesitated. He’d never been up against an antagonist like this. He understood that he had crossed over into unknown territory.
Knowing this, he rose and slowly and deliberately crossed the park and sat down beside the man, whose face he now saw had a distinctly Asian cast to it. To his credit, the man did not start or give any overt indication of surprise. He continued to watch the little boy. As the ice cream started to melt, his father showed him how to turn the cone to lick up the drippings.
“Who are you?” Bourne said. “Why do you want to kill me?”
The man beside him looked straight ahead, gave no sign at all that he had heard what Bourne had said. “Such a beatific scene of domestic bliss.” There was an acid edge to his voice. “I wonder if the child knows that at a moment’s notice his father could abandon him.”
Bourne had an odd reaction to hearing the other’s voice in this setting. It was as if he had moved out of the shadows to fully inhabit the world of those around them.
“No matter how much you want to kill me,” Bourne said, “you can’t touch me here in this public place.”
“The boy is, what, six, I would say. Far too young to understand the nature of life, far too young to fathom why his father would leave.”
Bourne shook his head. The conversation was not proceeding as he had intended. “What makes you think that? Why would the father abandon his son?”
“An interesting question from a man with two children. Jamie and Alison, isn’t it?”
Bourne started as if the other had plunged a knife into his side. Fear and anger swirled inside him but it was the anger that he allowed to rise to the surface. “I won’t even ask how you know so much about me, but I will tell you this, in threatening my family you’ve made a fatal mistake.”
“Oh, there’s no need to think that. I have no designs on your children,” Khan said evenly. “I was merely wondering how Jamie will feel when you never come back.”
“I’ll never abandon my son. I’ll do whatever it takes to come safely back to him.”
“It seems odd to me that you’re so passionate about your current family when you failed Dao, Joshua and Alyssa.”
Now the fear was gaining ground inside Bourne. His heart was pounding painfully, and there was a sharp pain in his chest. “What are you talking about? Where did you get the idea that I failed them?”
“You abandoned them to their fate, didn’t you?”
Bourne felt as if he was losing his grip on reality. “How dare you! They died! They were pulled away from me, and I’ve never forgotten them!”
The hint of a smile curled the edges of the other’s lips, as if he had scored a victory in dragging Bourne across the invisible barrier. “Not even when you married Marie? Not even when Jamie and Alison where born?” His tone was tightly wound now, as if he was struggling to keep something deep inside him held in check. “You tried to replicate Joshua and Alyssa. You even used the same first letters in their names.”
Bourne felt as if he’d been beaten senseless. There was an inchoate roaring in his ears. “Who are you?” he repeated in a strangled voice.
“I’m known as Khan. But who are you, David Webb? A professor of linguistics might possibly be at home in the wilderness, but he surely doesn’t know hand-to-hand combat; he doesn’t know how to fashion a Viet Cong cage-net; he doesn’t know how to hijack a car. Above all, he doesn’t know how to successfully conceal himself from the CIA.”
“It seems, then, that we’re a mystery to one another.”
That same maddening enigmatic smile played around Khan’s mouth. Bourne felt a prickling of the short hairs at the nape of his neck, the sense that something in his shattered memory was trying to surface.
“Keep telling yourself that. The fact is, I could kill you now, even in this public place,” Khan said with a great deal of venom. The smile had vanished as quickly as a cloud changes its shape, and there was a small tremor in the smooth bronze column of his neck, as if some fury, long held in check, had briefly escaped to the surface. “I should kill you now. But such extreme action would expose me to the pair of CIA agents who have entered the park from the north entrance.”
Without moving his head, Bourne directed his gaze in the indicated direction. Khan was quite right. Two Agency suits were scanning the faces of those in the immediate vicinity.
“I believe that it’s time we left.” Khan rose, looked down at Bourne for a moment. “This is a simple situation. Either come with me or be taken.”
Bourne got up and, walking side by side with Khan, went out of the park. Khan was between Bourne and the agents, and he took a route that would keep him in that position. Again, Bourne was impressed with the young man’s expertise as well as his thinking in extreme situations.
“Why are you doing this?” Bourne asked. He had not been immune to the other’s significant flare of temper, an incandescence as enigmatic to Bourne as it was alarming. Khan didn’t answer.
They entered the stream of pedestrians and were soon lost within the flow. Khan had witnessed the four agents heading into Lincoln Fine Tailors, and he had quickly memorized their faces. It hadn’t been difficult; in the jungle where he had raised himself, the instant identification of an individual often meant the difference between life and death. In any event, unlike Webb, he knew where all four were and he was on the lookout for the other two now, because at this crucial juncture when he was leading his target to a place of his choosing, he did not want any intrusion.
Sure enough, up ahead in the crowd, he spotted them. They were in standard formation, one on either side of the street, heading directly toward them. He turned to Webb to alert him, only to find that he was alone in the throng. Webb had vanished into thin air.
Chapter Seven
Deep within the bowels of Humanistas, Ltd. was a sophisticated listening station that monitored the clandestine signals traffic from all the various major intelligence networks. No human ear heard the raw data because no human ear would be able to make sense of it. Since the signals were encrypted, the intercepted traffic was run through a series of sophisticated software programs made up of heuristic algorithms—that is to say, they had the ability to learn. There was a program for each intelligence network because each agency had selected a different encryption algorithm.
Humanistas’ battery of programmers were more successful at breaking some codes than others, but the bottom line was that Spalko more or less knew what was going on all over the world. The American CIA code was one of the ones that had been broken, so within hours of the DCI ordering the termination of Jason Bourne, Stepan Spalko was reading about it.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now everything is going according to plan.” He set down the decryption, then pulled up a map of Nairobi on a monitor screen. He kept moving around the city until he found the area on the outskirts where President Jomo wanted the Humanistas medical team sent in to minister to the quarantined known AIDS patients.
At that moment his cell phone rang. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line. He checked his watch, said, finally, “There should be enough time. You’ve done well.” Then he took the elevator upstairs to Ethan Hearn’s office. On the way up, he made a single call, achieving in minutes what many others in Budapest had tried in vain for weeks to get—an orchestra seat for that night’s opera.
Humanistas, Ltd.’s newest young development officer was hard at work on his computer, but he stood up as soon as Spalko walked in. He looked as clean and neat as Spalko imagined he had when he had walked in to work this morning.
“No need to be formal around here, Ethan,” Spalko said with an easy smile. “This isn’t the army, you know.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.” Hearn stretched his back. “I’ve been at it since
seven this morning.”
“How goes the fund-raising?”
“I have two dinners and a lunch with solid prospects set up for early next week. I’ve e-mailed you a copy of the pitch letters I want to give to them.”
“Good, good.” Spalko glanced around the room as if to make certain no one else was in hearing distance. “Tell me, do you own a tux?”
“Absolutely, sir. I couldn’t do my job otherwise.”
“Excellent. Go home and change into it.”
“Sir?” The young man’s brows had knitted together in surprise.
“You’re going to the opera.”
“Tonight? At such short notice? How did you manage to get tickets?”
Spalko laughed. “You know, I like you, Ethan. I’m willing to bet you’re the last honest man on earth.”
“Sir, I have no doubt that would be you.”
Spalko laughed again at the bewildered expression that had come over the young man. “That was a joke, Ethan. Now, come on. There’s no time to lose.”
“But my work.” Hearn gestured at the computer screen.
“In a way, tonight will be work. There’ll be a man at the opera I want to recruit as a benefactor.” Spalko’s demeanor was so relaxed, so nonchalant that Hearn never suspected a thing. “This man—his name is László Molnar—”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“You wouldn’t.” Spalko’s voice lowered, became conspiratorial. “Though he is quite wealthy, he is paranoid about anyone knowing. He’s not on any donor list, that I can assure you, and if you make any allusion to his wealth, you might as well forget ever talking to him again.”
“I understand completely, sir,” Hearn said.
“He is a connoisseur of sorts, though nowadays it seems to me the word has lost much of its meaning.”
“Yes, sir.” Hearn nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”
Spalko was quite certain the young man had no idea what he meant, and a vague undertone of regret crept into his thoughts. He had once been as naive as Hearn, a hundred years ago, or so it now seemed. “In any event, Molnar loves opera. He has had a subscription for years.”