The driver steered the vehicle around the dirt curve into the drive. As rapidly as he had accelerated, he slowed down, his single headlight beam picking up the new obstruction protruding on the road. He approached it cautiously, at minimum speed, as if he were unsure of what it was; then he realized what it was and rushed forward. Without hesitation, he opened his side door, the tall Plexiglas shield swinging forward as he stepped out on the drive and walked around the front of the cart.
“Big Rex, you’re one bad dog, buddy,” said the driver in a half-loud, very Southern voice. “What’d you drag out of there, you dumb bastard? The brass-plated asshole would shave your coat for messing up his eestate!… Rex? Rex, you come here, you fuckin’ hound!” The man grabbed the limb and pulled it off the road under the pine tree into the shadows. “Rex, you hear me! You humpin’ knotholes, you horny stud?”
“Stay completely still and put your arms out in front of you,” said Jason Bourne, walking into view.
“Holy shit! Who are you?”
“Someone who doesn’t give a damn whether you live or die,” replied the intruder calmly.
“You got a gun! I can see it!”
“So do you. Yours is in your holster. Mine’s in my hand and it’s pointed at your head.”
“The dog! Where the hell’s the dawg?”
“Indisposed.”
“What?”
“He looks like a good dog. He could be anything a trainer wanted him to be. You don’t blame the animal, you blame the human who taught it.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“I guess the bottom line is that I’d rather kill the man than the animal, do I make myself clear?”
“Nothin’s clear! I jest know this man don’t want to get killed.”
“Then let’s talk, shall we?”
“I got words, but only one life, mister.”
“Lower your right arm and take out your gun—by the fingers, mister.” The guard did so, holding the weapon by his thumb and forefinger. “Lob it toward me, please.” The man obeyed. Bourne picked it up.
“What the hell’s this all about?” cried the guard, pleading.
“I want information. I was sent here to get it.”
“I’ll give you what I got if you let me get out of here. I don’t want nothin’ more to do with this place! I figured it was comin’ someday, I told Barbie Jo, you ask her! I told her someday people’d be comin’ around asking questions. But not this way, not your way! Not with guns aimed at our heads.”
“I assume Barbie Jo is your wife.”
“Sort of.”
“Then let’s start with why ‘people’ would come out here asking questions. My superiors want to know. Don’t worry, you won’t be involved, nobody’s interested in you. You’re just a security guard.”
“That’s all I am, mister!” interrupted the frightened man.
“Then why did you tell Barbie Jo what you did? That people would someday come out here asking questions.”
“Hell, I’m not sure.… Jest so many crazy things, y’know?”
“No, I don’t know. Like what?”
“Well, like the brass-plated screamer, the general. He’s a big wheel, right? He’s got Pentagon cars and drivers and even helicopters whenever he wants ’em, right? He owns this place, right?”
“So?”
“So that big mick of a sergeant—a lousy master sergeant—orders him around like he wasn’t toilet-trained, y’know what I mean? And that big-titty wife of his—she’s got a thing goin’ with the hulk and she don’t give a damn who knows it. It’s all crazy y’see what I mean?”
“I see a domestic mess, but I’m not sure it’s anybody’s business. Why would people come out here and ask questions?”
“Why are you out here, man? You figured there was a meetin’ tonight, didn’t you?”
“A meeting?”
“Them fancy limousines with the chauffeurs and the big shots, right? Well, you picked the wrong night. The dogs are out and they’re never let out when there’s a meetin’.”
Bourne paused, then spoke as he approached the guard. “We’ll continue this in the cart,” he said with authority. “I’ll crouch down and you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do.”
“You promised me I could get out of here!”
“You can, you will. Both you and the other fellow making the rounds. The gates over there, are they on an alarm?”
“Not when the dogs are loose. If those hounds see something out on the road and get excited, they’d jump up and set it off.”
“Where’s the alarm panel?”
“There are two of ’em. One’s in the sergeant’s place, the other’s in the front hall of the house. As long as the gates are closed, you can turn it on.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Where are we goin’?”
“I want to see every dog on the premises.”
Twenty-one minutes later, the remaining five attack dogs drugged and carried to their kennels, Bourne unlatched the entrance gate and let the two guards outside. He had given each three hundred dollars. “This will make up for any pay you lose,” he said.
“Hey, what about my car?” asked the second guard. “It ain’t much but it gets me around. Me and Willie come out here in it.”
“Do you have the keys?”
“Yeah, in my pocket. It’s parked in the back by the kennels.”
“Get it tomorrow.”
“Why don’t I get it now?”
“You’d make too much noise driving out, and my superiors will be arriving any moment. It’s best that they don’t see you. Take my word for it.”
“Holy shit! What’d I tell you, Jim-Bob? Jest like I tole Barbie Jo. This place is weird, man!”
“Three hundred bucks ain’t weird, Willie. C’mon, we’ll hitch. T’ain’t late and some of the boys’ll be on the road.… Hey, mister, who’s gonna take care of the hounds when they wake up? They got to be walked and fed before the morning shift, and they’ll tear apart any stranger who gets near ’em.”
“What about Swayne’s master sergeant? He can handle them, can’t he?”
“They don’t like him much,” offered the guard named Willie, “but they obey him. They’re better with the general’s wife, the horny bastards.”
“What about the general?” asked Bourne.
“He pisses bright yeller at the sight of ’em,” replied Jim-Bob.
“Thanks for the information. Go on now, get down the road a piece before you start hitchhiking. My superiors are coming from the other direction.”
“You know,” said the second guard, squinting in the moonlight at Jason, “this is the craziest fuckin’ night I ever expect to see. You get in here dressed like some gawddamn terrorist, but you talk and act like a shit-kickin’ army officer. You keep mentioning these ‘soopeeriors’ of yours; you drug the pups and pay us three hundred bucks to get out. I don’t understand nothin’!”
“You’re not supposed to. On the other hand, if I was really a terrorist, you’d probably be dead, wouldn’t you?”
“He’s right, Jim-Bob. Let’s get outta here!”
“What the hell are we supposed to say?”
“Tell anyone who asks you the truth. Describe what happened tonight. Also, you can add that the code name is Cobra.”
“My Gawd!” yelled Willie as both men fled into the road.
Bourne secured the gate and walked back to the patrol cart certain in the knowledge that whatever happened during the next hours, an appendage of Medusa had been thrown into a state of further anxiety. Questions would be asked feverishly—questions for which there were no answers. Nothing. Enigma.
He climbed into the cart, shifted gears and started for the cabin at the end of the graveled road that branched off from the immaculate circular drive.
* * *
He stood by the window peering inside, his face at the edge of the glass. The huge, overweight master sergeant was sitting in a large leather armchair, his
feet on an ottoman, watching television. From the sounds penetrating the window, specifically the rapid, high-pitched speech of an announcer, the general’s aide was engrossed in a baseball game. Jason scanned the room as best he could; it was typically rustic, a profusion of browns and reds, from dark furniture to checkered curtains, comfortable and masculine, a man’s cabin in the country. However, there were no weapons in sight, not even the accepted antique rifle over the fireplace, and no general-issue .45 automatic either on the sergeant’s person or on the table beside the chair. The aide had no concerns for his immediate safety and why should he? The estate of General Norman Swayne was totally secure—fence, gates, patrols and disciplined roving attack dogs at all points of entry. Bourne stared through the glass at the strong jowled face of the master sergeant. What secrets did that large head hold? He would find out. Medusa’s Delta One would find out if he had to carve that skull apart. Jason pushed himself away from the window and walked around the cabin to the front door. He knocked twice with the knuckles of his left hand; in his right was the untraceable automatic supplied by Alexander Conklin, the crown prince of dark operations.
“It’s open, Rachel!” yelled the rasping voice from within.
Bourne twisted the knob and shoved the door back; it swung slowly on its hinges and made contact with the wall. He walked inside.
“Jesus Christ!” roared the master sergeant, his heavy legs plunging off the ottoman as he wriggled his massive body out of the chair. “You!… You’re a goddamned ghost! You’re dead!”
“Try again,” said Delta of Medusa. “The name’s Flannagan, isn’t it? That’s what comes to mind.”
“You’re dead!” repeated the general’s aide, screaming, his eyes bulging in panic. “You bought it in Hong Kong! You were killed in Hong Kong … four, five years ago!”
“You kept tabs—”
“We know … I know!”
“You’ve got connections in the right places, then.”
“You’re Bourne!”
“Obviously born again, you might say.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“Believe, Flannagan. It’s the ‘we’ we’re going to talk about. Snake Lady, to be precise.”
“You’re the one—the one Swayne called ‘Cobra’!”
“It’s a snake.”
“I don’t get it—”
“It’s confusing.”
“You’re one of us!”
“I was. I was also cut out. I snaked back in, as it were.”
The sergeant frantically looked at the door, then the windows. “How’d you get in here? Where are the guards, the dogs? Jesus! Where are they?”
“The dogs are asleep in the kennels, so I gave the guards the night off.”
“You gave …? The dogs are on the grounds!”
“Not any longer. They were persuaded to rest.”
“The guards—the goddamned guards!”
“They were persuaded to leave. What they think is happening here tonight is even more confusing.”
“What’ve you done—what are you doing?”
“I thought I just mentioned it. We’re going to talk, Sergeant Flannagan. I want to get caught up with some old comrades.”
The frightened man backed awkwardly away from the chair. “You’re the maniac they called Delta before you turned and went in business for yourself!” he cried in a guttural whisper. “There was a picture, a photograph—you were laid out on a slab, bloodstains all over the sheet from the bullet wounds; your face was uncovered, your eyes wide open, holes still bleeding on your forehead and your throat.… They asked me who you were and I said, ‘He’s Delta. Delta One from the illegals,’ and they said, ‘No, he’s not, he’s Jason Bourne, the killer, the assassin,’ so I said, ‘Then they’re one and the same because that man is Delta—I knew him.’ They thanked me and told me to go back and join the others.”
“Who were ‘they’?”
“Some people over at Langley. The one who did all the talking had a limp; he carried a cane.”
“And ‘the others’—they told you to go back and join?”
“About twenty-five or thirty of the old Saigon crowd.”
“Command Saigon?”
“Yeah.”
“Men who worked with our crowd, the ‘illegals’?”
“Mostly, yeah.”
“When was this?”
“For Christ’s sake, I told you!” roared the panicked aide. “Four or five years ago! I saw the photograph—you were dead!”
“Only a single photograph,” interrupted Bourne quietly, staring at the master sergeant. “You have a very good memory.”
“You held a gun to my head. Thirty-three years, two wars and twelve combat tours, nobody ever did that to me—nobody but you.… Yeah, I gotta good memory.”
“I think I understand.”
“I don’t! I don’t understand a goddamned thing! You were dead!”
“You’ve said that. But I’m not, am I? Or maybe I am. Maybe this is the nightmare that’s been visited upon you after twenty years of deceit.”
“What kind of crap is that? What the hell—”
“Don’t move!”
“I’m not!”
Suddenly, in the distance, there was a loud report. A gunshot! Jason spun around … then instinct commanded him to keep turning! All around! The massive general’s aide was lunging at him, his huge hands like battering rams grazing off Bourne’s shoulders as Delta One viciously lashed up his right foot, catching the sergeant’s kidney, embedding his shoe deep into the flesh while crashing the barrel of his automatic into the base of the man’s neck. Flannagan lurched downward, splayed on the floor; Jason hammered his left foot into the sergeant’s head, stunning him into silence.
A silence that was broken by the continuous hysterical screams of a woman racing outside toward the open door of the cabin. Within seconds, General Norman Swayne’s wife burst into the room, recoiling at the sight in front of her, gripping the back of the nearest chair, unable to contain her panic.
“He’s dead!” she shrieked, collapsing, swerving the chair to her side as she fell to the floor reaching for her lover. “He shot himself, Eddie! Oh, my God, he killed himself!”
Jason Bourne rose from his crouched position and walked to the door of the strange cabin that held so many secrets. Calmly, watching his two prisoners, he closed it. The woman wept, gasping, trembling, but they were tears not of sorrow but of fear. The sergeant blinked his eyes and raised his huge head. If any emotion could be defined in his expression, it was an admixture of fury and bewilderment.
11
“Don’t touch anything,” ordered Bourne as Flannagan and Rachel Swayne haltingly preceded him into the general’s photograph-lined study. At the sight of the old soldier’s corpse arched back in the chair behind the desk, the ugly gun still in his outstretched hand, and the horror beyond left by the blowing away of the back of his skull, the wife convulsed, falling to her knees as if she might vomit. The master sergeant grabbed her arm, holding her off the floor, his eyes dazed, fixed on the mutilated remains of General Norman Swayne.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” whispered Flannagan, his voice strained and barely audible. Then standing motionless, the muscles of his jaw pulsating, he roared. “You insane fuckin’ son of a bitch! What did you do it for—why? What do we do now?”
“You call the police, Sergeant,” answered Jason.
“What?” yelled the aide, spinning around.
“No!” screamed Mrs. Swayne, lurching to her feet. “We can’t do that!”
“I don’t think you’ve got a choice. You didn’t kill him. You may have driven him to kill himself but you didn’t kill him.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Flannagan gruffly.
“Better a simple if messy domestic tragedy than a far wider investigation, wouldn’t you say? I gather it’s no secret that you two have an arrangement that’s—well, no secret.”
“He didn’t give a shit a
bout our ‘arrangement,’ and that was no secret, either.”
“He encouraged us at every opportunity,” added Rachel Swayne, hesitantly smoothing her skirt, oddly, swiftly regaining her composure. She spoke to Bourne but her eyes strayed to her lover. “He consistently threw us together, often for days at a time.… Do we have to stay in here? My God, I was married to that man for twenty-six years! I’m sure you can understand … this is horrible for me!”
“We have things to discuss,” said Bourne.
“Not in here, if you please. The living room; it’s across the hall. We’ll talk there.” Mrs. Swayne, suddenly under control, walked out of the study; the general’s aide glanced over at the blood-drenched corpse, grimaced, and followed her.
Jason watched them. “Stay in the hallway where I can see you and don’t move!” he shouted, crossing to the desk, his eyes darting from one object to another, taking in the last items Norman Swayne saw before placing the automatic in his mouth. Something was wrong. On the right side of the wide green blotter was a Pentagon memorandum pad, Swayne’s rank and name printed below the insignia of the United States Army. Next to the pad, to the left of the blotter’s leather border, was a gold ballpoint pen, its sharp silver point protruding, as if recently used, the writer forgetting to twist it back into its-recess. Bourne leaned over the desk within inches of the dead body, the acrid smell of the exploded shell and burnt flesh still pungent, and studied the memo pad. It was blank, but Jason carefully tore off the top pages, folded them, and put them into his trousers pocket. He stepped back still bothered.… What was it? He looked around the room, and as his eyes roamed over the furniture Master Sergeant Flannagan appeared in the doorway.