In addition to the changes, Noel had grown older, the aging process swift and painful. It had been four months since they had taken him from the embankment on the road north of Fribourg, but, looking at him, one might judge the time elapsed to be nearer ten years.
Still, he had his life, and his body had sprung back under the care of Helden and the rigor of the never-ending exercises ordered by Litvak, supervised by a once-formidable commando from Har Sha’alav.
Yakov took pleasure in these sessions. He demanded excellence, and Holcroft met the demands; full health was required in the physical instrument before the real training could begin.
It would begin tomorrow. High in the spring hills and mountains, beyond the scrutiny of prying eyes, but under the harshest scrutiny of Yakov Ben-Gadíz. The pupil would do what the master could do no longer; the pupil would be put through the rigors of hell until he excelled the master.
Tomorrow it would begin.
DEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
Berlin, July 4 — The Bundestag today gave its formal consent to the establishment of rehabilitation centers patterned after those in America in the states of Arizona and Texas. These centers will be, as their U.S. counterparts, primarily educational in nature and will be under the supervision of the military.
Those sentenced for rehabilitation terms will have been judged by the courts to be guilty of crimes against the German people.…
“Wire! Rope! Chain!”
“Use your fingers! They’re weapons; never forget it.…”
“Scale that tree again, you were too slow.…”
“Climb the hill and get back down without my seeing you.…”
“I saw you. Your head was blown off!”
“Press the nerve, not the vein! There are five nerve points. Find them. With the blindfold on. Feel them.…”
“Roll out of a fall; don’t crouch.…”
“Every action must have two alternate, split-second options. Train yourself to think in those terms. Instinctively.…”
“Accuracy is a question of zero-sighting, immobility, and breathing. Fire again, seven shots; they must be within a two-inch diameter.…”
“Escape, escape, escape! Use your surroundings; melt into them! Don’t be afraid to stay still. A man standing motionless is often the last person seen.…”
The summer months passed, and Yakov Ben-Gadíz was pleased. The pupil was now better than the master. He was ready.
As was his colleague; she was ready, too. Together they would form the team.
The Sonnenkinder were marked. The list was taken out and studied.
THE HERALD TRIBUNE
Paris, Oct. 10 — The international agency in Zurich known as Anvil today announced the formation of an independent Board of Chancellors selected by secret ballot from member nations. The first Anvil Congress will be held on the 25th of the month.…
The couple walked down the street in Zurich’s Lindenhof district, on the left bank of the Limmat River. The man was fairly tall, but stooped, a pronounced limp impeding his progress through the crowds, the shabby suitcase in his hand a further hindrance. The woman held his arm, more as though guiding an irritable responsibility than with affection. Neither spoke: They were a couple grown to an indeterminable age together in mutual loathing.
They reached an office building and went inside, the man limping after the woman toward the bank of elevators. They stopped in front of the starter; the woman asked in decidedly middle-class German the office number of a small accounting firm.
She was given a number on the twelfth floor, the top floor, but as it was the lunch hour, the starter doubted anyone was there. It did not matter; the couple would wait.
They stepped out of the elevator on the twelfth floor; the hallway was deserted. The moment the elevator door closed, the couple ran to the staircase at the right end of the corridor. Gone was the limp; gone were the somber faces. They raced up the steps to the door of the roof and stopped on the landing. The man set down the suitcase, knelt, and opened it. Inside were the barrel and stock of a rifle, a telescopic sight clamped to the former, a strap to the latter.
He took the parts out and attached them. Then he removed his hat with the wig sewn into the crown and threw it into the suitcase. He stood up and helped the woman take off her coat, pulling the sleeves through, reversing the cloth. It was now a well-cut, expensive beige topcoat, purchased at one of the better shops in Paris.
The woman then helped the man reverse his overcoat. It was transformed into a fashionable gentleman’s fall coat, trimmed in suede. The woman took off her kerchief, removed several pins, and let her blond hair fall down over her shoulders. She opened her purse and took out a revolver.
“I’ll be here,” said Helden. “Good hunting.”
“Thanks,” said Noel, opening the door to the roof.
He crouched against the wall by an out-of-use chimney, inserted his arm through the sling, and pulled the strap taut. He reached into his pocket and took out three shells; he pressed them into the chamber and slapped the bolt into firing position. Every action must have two alternate, split-second options.
He would not need them. He would not miss.
He turned and knelt by the wall. He edged the rifle over the top and put his eye to the telescopic sight.
Twelve stories below, across the street, crowds were cheering various men coming out of the huge glass doors of the Lindenhof Hôtel. They walked into the sunlight under banners hailing the first Anvil Congress.
There he was. In the gunsight, the cross hairs centered on the sculptured face beneath the shining blond hair.
Holcroft squeezed the trigger. Twelve stories below, the sculptured face erupted into a mass of blood and shattered flesh.
The Tinamou was killed at last.
By the Tinamou.
They were everywhere. It had only begun.
For Michael and Laura—
A lovely, talented, wonderful couple.
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.”
“His hands won’t let go of the plank!”
“Reach down! Pry them up! It may be the death lock.”
“No. He’s alive … but barely, I think. His lips move, but there’s no sound. His eyes also, though I doubt he sees us.”
“The hands are free!”
“Lift him up. Grab his shoulders and pull him over. Easy, now!”
“Mother of God, look at his head!” yelled the crewman. “It’s split open.”
“He must have crashed it against the plank in the storm,” said the brother.
“No,” disagreed the skipper, staring at the wound. “It’s a clean slice, razorlike. Caused by a bullet; he was shot.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“In more than one place,” added the skipper, his eyes roving over the body. “We’ll head for Ile de Port Noir; it’s the nearest island. There’s a doctor on the waterfront.”
“The Englishman?”
“He practices.”
“When he can,” said the skipper’s brother. “When the wine lets him. He has more success with his patients’ animals than with his patients.”
“It won’t matter. This will be a corpse by the time we get there. If by chance he lives, I’ll bill him for the extra petrol and whatever catch we miss. Get the kit; we’ll bind his head for all the good it will do.”
“Look!” cried the crewman. “Look at his eyes.”
“What about them?” asked the brother.
“A moment ago they were gray—as gray as steel cables. Now they’re blue!”
“The sun’s brighter,” said the skipper, shrugging. “Or it’s playing tricks with your own eyes. No matter, there’s no color in the grave.”
Intermittent whistles of fishing boats clashed with the incessant screeching of the gulls; together they formed the universal sounds of the waterfront. It was late afternoon, the sun a fireball in the west, the air still and too damp, too hot. Above the piers and facing the harbor was a cobblestone street and several blemished white houses, separated by overgrown grass shooting up from dried earth and sand. What remained of the verandas were patched latticework and crumbling stucco supported by hastily implanted pilings. The residences had seen better days a number of decades ago when the residents mistakenly believed Ile de Port Noir might become another Mediterranean playground. It never did.
All the houses had paths to the street, but the last house in the row had a path obviously more trampled than the others. It belonged to an Englishman who had come to Port Noir eight years before under circumstances no one understood or cared to; he was a doctor and the waterfront had need of a doctor. Hooks, needles and knives were at once means of livelihood as well as instruments of incapacitation. If one saw le docteur on a good day, the sutures were not too bad. On the other hand, if the stench of wine or whiskey was too pronounced, one took one’s chances.
Tant pis! He was better than no one.
But not today; no one used the path today. It was Sunday and it was common knowledge that on any Saturday night the doctor was roaring drunk in the village, ending the evening with whatever whore was available. Of course, it was also granted that during the past few Saturdays the doctor’s routine had altered; h
e had not been seen in the village. But nothing ever changed that much; bottles of scotch were sent to the doctor on a regular basis. He was simply staying in his house; he had been doing so since the fishing boat from La Ciotat had brought in the unknown man who was more corpse than man.
Dr. Geoffrey Washburn awoke with a start, his chin settled into his collarbone causing the odor of his mouth to invade his nostrils; it was not pleasant. He blinked, orienting himself, and glanced at the open bedroom door. Had his nap been interrupted by another incoherent monologue from his patient? No; there was no sound. Even the gulls outside were mercifully quiet; it was Ile de Port Noir’s holy day, no boats coming in to taunt the birds with their catches.
Washburn looked at the empty glass and the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the table beside his chair. It was an improvement. On a normal Sunday both would be empty by now, the pain of the previous night having been spiraled out by the scotch. He smiled to himself, once again blessing an older sister in Coventry who made the scotch possible with her monthly stipend. She was a good girl, Bess was, and God knew she could afford a hell of a lot more than she sent him, but he was grateful she did what she did. And one day she would stop, the money would stop, and then the oblivions would be achieved with the cheapest wine until there was no pain at all. Ever.
He had come to accept that eventuality … until three weeks and five days ago when the half-dead stranger had been dragged from the sea and brought to his door by fishermen who did not care to identify themselves. Their errand was one of mercy, not involvement. God would understand; the man had been shot.
What the fishermen had not known was that far more than bullets had invaded the man’s body. And mind.