The Chancellor Manuscript: A Novel

  He thought of overpowering Sutherland when they were alone. It was something to keep him from screaming.

  “How could O’Brien do that?” Peter asked. “You said he couldn’t go to anyone, that you’d know if he did.”

  “On the surface it would appear impossible. He’s isolated.”

  “Then, why are we stopping. Why are we wasting time?”

  “I saw what O’Brien did at the marina yesterday morning. Courage and ingenuity are to be respected. It’s a simple precaution.”

  The car stopped. Whatever thoughts Peter had of attacking Sutherland were dispelled quickly. The man beside the driver leaped out of the car, opened the door next to Chancellor, and grabbed his arm. A pair of handcuffs were snapped to his wrist and to the metal clasp below the window. The movement put his shoulder in agony. He winced and held his breath.

  The judge climbed out of the back seat. “I leave you to your thoughts, Mr. Chancellor.”

  The two young black men disappeared into the darkness.

  It was the longest forty-five minutes Peter could imagine. He tried to think of the various tactics O’Brien might conceive of, but the more he thought about them, the more bleak were his conclusions. If Quinn had managed to get help, as surely he must have done, the additional men would be seen by Sutherland’s scouts. Death. If for some reason O’Brien had decided to come alone, then he would die. But at least Alison would live. There was some comfort in that.

  The scouts returned, drenched with sweat They had been running hard; they’d covered a great deal of ground.

  The black on the left opened the door and Sutherland climbed in. “It would appear that Mr. O’Brien keeps the rendezvous. He is sitting in an automobile with the motor running, in the center of the road where he can observe all sides. There is no one else within three miles of the station.”

  Chancellor was too numb and too sick to think clearly. His last amateurish gesture had been to lead Quinn into the trap.

  It’s over.

  The Mark TV started. They approached the intersection; the driver braked the Continental slowly, and they came to a stop. The black on the driver’s right got out and opened Chancellor’s door. He unlocked the cuffs; Peter shook his wrist trying to restore the circulation. His wounded shoulder began to hurt again. It did not matter.

  “Get behind the wheel, Mr. Chancellor. You’ll drive now. My two friends will be crouched behind you in the back seat, their guns drawn. The girl dies if you disregard instructions.”

  Sutherland got out of the car with Peter, and stood by the door, facing him.

  “You’re wrong. You know that, don’t you?” said Chancellor.

  “You look for absolutes. As with precedents, they’re all too often imperfect, and much of the time they don’t apply. There’s no right and wrong between us. We’re products of a long-standing crisis neither of us is responsible for but both are swept up in.”

  “Is that a judicial opinion?”

  “No, Mr. Chancellor. It’s the opinion of a Negro. I was a Negro before I was a judge.” Sutherland turned and walked away.

  Peter watched him, then climbed in behind the wheel and slammed the door. It’s over. Dear God, if you exist, let it come quickly, furiously. I have no courage.

  Peter turned right at the intersection and drove down the road. The gas station was on the left, a single naked light bulb in a bracket above the pumps.

  “Slow down,” came the quiet command from the back.

  “What’s the difference?” said Chancellor.

  “Slow down!”

  The barrel of a gun was shoved into the base of his skull. He pressed the brake of the Mark IV and coasted toward the station. He approached the rear of O’Brien’s car; it had to be Quinn’s. The vapor from exhaust curled in the night air, the headlights illuminating the distant country road beyond.

  Peter was alarmed. The lights from the Mark IV shone directly into the rear window of O’Brien’s car. It was empty.

  “He’s not there,” whispered Chancellor.

  “He’s below the seat,” said the low voice on his right.

  “Get out and walk to the car,” said the other man.

  Peter turned off the motor, opened the door, and stepped out on the road. He closed his eyes briefly, wondering if a gun would fire at him the instant Quinn appeared. He was not fooled. Sutherland would spare Alison, but there’d be no conversation over the telephone. The judge would take no such risk.

  But O’Brien did not get out of the automobile.

  “Quinn,” called Chancellor. There was no answer.

  What are you doing, O’Brien? It’s over!

  Nothing.

  Peter walked toward the car, his temples throbbing, the pain in his throat agonizing. The sound of the idling engine mingled with the night noises; a breeze swirled dry leaves across the roadway. Any second now, Quinn would show himself; gunshots would follow. Would he hear them as his life ended? He approached the driver’s window.

  There was no one there.

  “Chancellor! Get down!”

  The scream came from out of the darkness. The sudden roar of a powerful motor filled the night Blinding headlights shot out from the left, from the gas station! A car came racing out of the dim light, speeding directly at the silver Mark IV. The driver’s door swung open; a figure lunged out, rolling on the pavement.

  The impact came, a thunderous collision, the crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the screams of the two men inside … all came at once, and at once Peter knew the last fury he had hoped for had arrived.

  Gunshots followed, as he knew they would. He closed his eyes and gripped the hard surface of the road; the searing, icelike pain would come. The darkness would come.

  The firing continued; Chancellor rolled his face to the side. It came from Quinn O’Brien!

  Peter raised his head. Smoke and dust billowed in the air. In front of him he saw O’Brien throw himself into the side of the idling car; he was only feet from Chancellor. The agent crouched, both hands extended over the trunk, his pistol leveled.

  “Get over here!” he roared to Peter.

  Chancellor lunged forward, knees and hands pounding the tar beneath, until he reached the automobile.

  He saw O’Brien hesitate, then raise his head and take careful aim.

  The explosion came. The gas tank of the Continental erupted. Peter crouched in front of Quinn. Through a blanket of flames one of Sutherland’s scouts lurched out of the burning car, firing at the source of O’Brien’s gunshots.

  But the man could be seen clearly in the light of the spreading fires; flames had ignited his clothes. O’Brien aimed again. There was a scream; the scout fell to the ground behind the burning automobile.

  “Quinn!” yelled Peter. “How?”

  “I understood you! When you used ‘senator’ in your code, you meant it was our last hope. You meant there was a crisis. You said I had to be alone; that meant you weren’t But you were in one car, that car, so I needed two. One a decoy!” O’Brien shouted as he inched forward around Chancellor toward the hood.

  “A decoy?”

  “A diversion! I paid a guy to follow me and leave his car. If I could hit and run, we had a chance. What the hell, there was nothing left!” He raised his gun over the hood and leveled it.

  “Nothing left …” Peter echoed the phrase, suddenly aware of its ultimate truth.

  Quinn fired three shots in rapid succession. Chancellor’s mind went blank for a moment, then was brought back to the madness by a second explosion from the Continental.

  O’Brien spun around toward Chancellor. “Get inside!” he yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Peter rose to his feet; he grabbed O’Brien’s jacket, stopping him. “Quinn! Quinn, wait! There are no others! Just him! Back in the road. He’s alone!”

  “Who?”

  “Sutherland. It’s Daniel Sutherland.”

  O’Brien’s wild eyes stared at Peter for a brief instant. “Get in,” he com
manded. He swung the idling car around in a U-turn and sped toward the intersection.

  In the distance the headlights showed the immense figure of Daniel Sutherland, standing in the middle of the road. The black giant had seen what had happened. He raised his hand to his head.

  There was a final gunshot.

  Sutherland fell.

  Venice was dead. Inver Brass was gone.

  Epilogue

  Morning. Peter stood by the hatch table in his study, holding the telephone, listening to the words spoken in quiet anger from Washington. The sun streamed through the windows. Outside, the snow was deep, pure white; sharp reflections of sunlight bounced continuously up into the glass. Proof of the earth’s movement. As the voice on the telephone was proof of one aspect of the human condition; ultimately there was to be found a sense of morality.

  The caller was Daniel Sutherland’s son, Aaron. Firebrand, brilliant attorney for the black movement, a man Chancellor wanted to call a friend but knew he never could.

  “I will not fight you that way! I won’t lower myself to use your weapons. And I won’t let others use them. I found the files. I burned them! You’ll have to take my word.”

  “I was willing to take your father’s when I thought I was going to die. I believed him. I believe you.”

  “You don’t have a choice.” The lawyer hung up.

  Chancellor walked back to his couch and sat down. Through the north window he could see Alison, bundled in a coat, laughing, her arms folded, warding off the winter chill. She was between Mrs. Alcott and the taciturn groundskeeper, Burrows, who today seemed positively voluble. Mrs. Alcott was smiling at Alison.

  Mrs. Alcott approved. The lady of the house was in residence. The home needed that lady.

  The three of them turned toward the barn and started down the shoveled path that was bordered by shrubs, a green and white colonnade. In the distance, beyond the fence, a colt raced freely, then stopped and cocked his head at the threesome. He pranced toward them, his mane flowing.

  Peter looked down at the pages of his manuscript At the fiction. The fantasy that was his reality. He had made his decision.

  He would start at the beginning, knowing it would be much better now. The invention would be there: thoughts and words put in the minds of others. But for himself no invention was needed. The experience was whole and never to be forgotten.

  The story would be written as a novel. His reality. Let others find other meanings. He leaned forward and picked up a pencil from the tankard. He began on a fresh yellow pad.

  The dark-haired man stared at the wall in front of him. His chair, like the rest of the furniture, was pleasing to the eye but not made for comfort. The style was Early American, the theme Spartan, as if those about to be granted an audience with the occupant of the inner office should reflect on their awesome opportunity in stern surroundings.

  The man was in his late twenties, his face angular, the features sharp, each pronounced and definite as if carved by a craftsman more aware of details than of the whole. It was a face in quiet conflict with itself.…

  FOR MARY—

  The reasons increase each day.

  Above all, there is Mary.

  Read on for an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s

  The Bourne Identity

  1

  The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.

  Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.

  A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.

  The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

  He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.

  And there was heat, a strange moist heat at his temple that seared through the freezing water that kept swallowing him, a fire where no fire should burn. There was ice, too; an ice-like throbbing in his stomach and his legs and his chest, oddly warmed by the cold sea around him. He felt these things, acknowledging his own panic as he felt them. He could see his own body turning and twisting, arms and feet working frantically against the pressures of the whirlpool. He could feel, think, see, perceive panic and struggle—yet strangely there was peace. It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.

  Then another form of panic spread through him, surging through the heat and the ice and the uninvolved recognition. He could not submit to peace! Not yet! It would happen any second now; he was not sure what it was, but it would happen. He had to be there!

  He kicked furiously, clawing at the heavy walls of water above, his chest burning. He broke surface, thrashing to stay on top of the black swells. Climb up! Climb up!

  A monstrous rolling wave accommodated; he was on the crest, surrounded by pockets of foam and darkness. Nothing. Turn! Turn!

  It happened. The explosion was massive; he could hear it through the clashing waters and the wind, the sight and the sound somehow his doorway to peace. The sky lit up like a fiery diadem and within that crown of fire, objects of all shapes and sizes were blown through the light into the outer shadows.

  He had won. Whatever it was, he had won.

  Suddenly he was plummeting downward again, into an abyss again. He could feel the rushing waters crash over his shoulders, cooling the white-hot heat at his temple, warming the ice-cold incisions in his stomach and his legs and.…

  His chest. His chest was in agony! He had been struck—the blow crushing, the impact sudden and intolerable. It happened again! Let me alone. Give me peace.

  And again!

  And he clawed again, and kicked again … until he felt it. A thick, oily object that moved only with the movements of the sea. He could not tell what it was, but it was there and he could feel it, hold it.

  Hold it! It will ride you to peace. To the silence of darkness … and peace.

  The rays of the early sun broke through the mists of the eastern sky, lending glitter to the calm waters of the Mediterranean. The skipper of the small fishing boat, his eyes bloodshot, his hands marked with rope burns, sat on the stern gunnel smoking a Gauloise, grateful for the sight of the smooth sea. He glanced over at the open wheelhouse; his younger brother was easing the throttle forward to make better time, the single other crewman checking a net several feet away. They were laughing at something and that was good; there had been nothing to laugh about last night. Where had the storm come from? The weather reports from Marseilles had indicated nothing; if they had he would have stayed in the shelter of the
coastline. He wanted to reach the fishing grounds eighty kilometers south of La Seyne-sur-Mer by daybreak, but not at the expense of costly repairs, and what repairs were not costly these days?

  Or at the expense of his life, and there were moments last night when that was a distinct consideration.

  “Tu es fatigué, hein, mon frère?” his brother shouted, grinning at him. “Va te coucher maintenant. Laisse-moi faire.”

  “D’accord,” the brother answered, throwing his cigarette over the side and sliding down to the deck on top of a net. “A little sleep won’t hurt.”

  It was good to have a brother at the wheel. A member of the family should always be the pilot on a family boat; the eyes were sharper. Even a brother who spoke with the smooth tongue of a literate man as opposed to his own coarse words. Crazy! One year at the university and his brother wished to start a compagnie. With a single boat that had seen better days many years ago. Crazy. What good did his books do last night? When his compagnie was about to capsize.

  He closed his eyes, letting his hands soak in the rolling water on the deck. The salt of the sea would be good for the rope burns. Burns received while lashing equipment that did not care to stay put in the storm.

  “Look! Over there!”

  It was his brother, apparently sleep was to be denied by sharp family eyes.

  “What is it?” he yelled.

  “Port bow! There’s a man in the water! He’s holding on to something! A piece of debris, a plank of some sort.”

  The skipper took the wheel, angling the boat to the right of the figure in the water, cutting the engines to reduce the wake. The man looked as though the slightest motion would send him sliding off the fragment of wood he clung to; his hands were white, gripped around the edge like claws, but the rest of his body was limp—as limp as a man fully drowned, passed from this world.

  “Loop the ropes!” yelled the skipper to his brother and the crewman. “Submerge them around his legs. Easy now! Move them up to his waist. Pull gently.”