“Oh, for God’s sake …!” The agitated lawyer shook his head back and forth, stammered several times and let the words rush out. “Holland—all right, you’ll see.… We recruited a man at the CIA, an analyst named DeSole who panicked and wanted to sever his relations with us. Naturally, we couldn’t permit that, so we had him eliminated—professionally eliminated—as we were forced to do with several others who we believed were dangerously unstable. Holland may have had his suspicions and probably speculated on foul play, but he couldn’t do any more than speculate—the professionals we employed left no traces; they never do.”
“Very well,” said Sulikov, holding his place by the mantel and gazing down at the nervous Ogilvie. “Next, Alexander Conklin.”
“He’s a former CIA station chief and tied in with Panov, a psychiatrist—they’re both connected to the man they call Jason Bourne and his wife. They go back years, to Saigon, in fact. You see, we had been penetrated, several of our people were reached and threatened, and DeSole came to the conclusion that this Bourne, with Conklin’s help, was the one responsible for the penetration.”
“How could he do that?”
“I don’t know. I only know that he has to be eliminated and our professionals have accepted the contract—contracts. They all have to go.”
“You mentioned Saigon.”
“Bourne was part of the old Medusa,” admitted Ogilvie quietly. “And like most of that crowd in the field, a thieving misfit.… It could be something as simple as his having recognized someone from twenty years ago. The story DeSole heard was that this trash Bourne—that’s not his real name, incidentally—was actually trained by the Agency to pose as an international assassin for the purpose of drawing out a killer they call the Jackal. Ultimately, the strategy failed and Bourne was pensioned off—gold-watch time. ‘Thanks for trying, old sport, but it’s over now.’ Obviously, he wanted a great deal more than that, so he came after us.… You can see now, can’t you? The two issues are completely separate; there’s no linkage. One has nothing to do with the other.”
The Russian unclasped his hands and took a step forward away from the mantel. His expression was more one of concern than of alarm. “Can you really be so blind, or is your vision so tunneled that you see nothing but your enterprise?”
“I reject your insult out of hand. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The connection is there because it was engineered, created for one purpose only. You were merely a by-product, a side issue that suddenly became immensely important to the authorities.”
“I don’t … understand,” whispered Ogilvie, his face growing pale.
“You just said ‘a killer they call the Jackal,’ and before that you alluded to Bourne as a relatively insignificant rogue agent trained to pose as an assassin, a strategy that failed, so he was pensioned off—’gold-watch time,’ I believe you said.”
“It’s what I was told—”
“And what else were you told about Carlos the Jackal? About the man who uses the name Jason Bourne? What do you know about them?”
“Very little, frankly. Two aging killers, scum who’ve been stalking each other for years. Again, frankly, who gives a damn? My only concern is the complete confidentiality of our organization—which you’ve seen fit to question.”
“You still don’t see, do you?”
“See what, for God’s sake?”
“Bourne may not be the lowly scum you think he is, not when you consider his associates.”
“Please be clearer,” said Ogilvie in a flat monotone.
“He’s using Medusa to hunt the Jackal.”
“Impossible! That Medusa was destroyed years ago in Saigon!”
“Obviously he thought otherwise. Would you care to remove your well-tailored jacket, roll up your sleeve, and display the small tattoo on your inner forearm?”
“No relevance! A mark of honor in a war no one supported, but we had to fight!”
“Oh, come, Counselor. From the piers and the supply depots in Saigon? Stealing your forces blind and routing couriers to the banks in Switzerland. Medals aren’t issued for those heroics.”
“Pure speculation without foundation!” exclaimed Ogilvie.
“Tell that to Jason Bourne, a graduate of the original Snake Lady.… Oh, yes, Counselor, he looked for you and he found you and he’s using you to go after the Jackal.”
“For Christ’s sake, how?”
“I honestly don’t know, but you’d better read these.” The consul general crossed rapidly to the hotel desk, picked up a sheaf of stapled typewritten pages, and brought them over to Bryce Ogilvie. “These are decoded telephone conversations that took place four hours ago at our embassy in Paris. The identities are established, the destinations as well. Read them carefully, Counselor, then render me your legal opinion.”
The celebrated attorney, the Ice-Cold Ogilvie, grabbed the papers and with swift, practiced eyes began reading. As he flipped from one page to another, the blood drained from his face to the pallor of death. “My God, they know it all. My offices are wired! How? Why? It’s insane! We’re impenetrable!”
“Again, I suggest you tell that to Jason Bourne and his old friend and station chief from Saigon, Alexander Conklin. They found you.”
“They couldn’t have!” roared Ogilvie. “We paid off or eliminated everyone in Snake Lady who even suspected the extent of our activities. Jesus, there weren’t that many and goddamned few in the field! I told you, they were scum and we knew better—they were the thieves of the world and wanted for crimes all over Australia and the Far East. The ones in combat we knew and we reached!”
“You missed a couple, I believe,” observed Sulikov.
The lawyer returned to the typed pages, beads of sweat rolling down his temples. “God in heaven, I’m ruined,” he whispered, choking.
“The thought occurred to me,” said the Soviet consul general of New York, “but then, there are always options, aren’t there?… Naturally, there’s only one course of action for us. Like much of the continent, we were taken in by ruthless capitalist privateers. Lambs led to the slaughter on the altars of greed as this American cartel of financial plunderers cornered markets, selling inferior goods and services at inflated prices, claiming by way of false documents to have Washington’s approval to deliver thousands of restricted items to us and our satellites.”
“You son of a bitch!” exploded Ogilvie. “You—all of you—cooperated every step of the way. You brokered millions for us out of the bloc countries, rerouted, renamed—Christ, repainted—ships throughout the Mediterranean, the Aegean, up the Bosporus and into Marmara, to say nothing about ports in the Baltic!”
“Prove it, Counselor,” said Sulikov, laughing quietly. “If you wish, I could make a laudable case for your defection. Moscow would welcome your expertise.”
“What?” cried the attorney as panic spread across his face.
“Well, you certainly can’t stay here an hour longer than absolutely necessary. Read those words, Mr. Ogilvie. You’re in the last stages of electronic surveillance before being picked up by the authorities.”
“Oh, my God—”
“You might try to operate from Hong Kong or Macao—they’d welcome your money, but with the problems they currently have with the Mainland’s markets and the Sino-British Treaty of ’97, they’d probably frown on your indictments. I’d say Switzerland’s out; the reciprocal laws are so narrow these days, as Vesco found out. Ahh, Vesco. You could join him in Cuba.”
“Stop it!” yelled Ogilvie.
“Then again you could turn state’s evidence; there’s so much to unravel. They might even take, say, ten years off your thirty-year sentence.”
“Goddamn it, I’ll kill you!”
The bedroom door suddenly opened as a consulate guard appeared, his hand menacingly under his jacket. The attorney had lurched to his feet; trembling helplessly, he returned to the chair and leaned forward, his head in his hands.
“Such be
havior would not be looked upon favorably,” said Sulikov. “Come, Counselor, it’s a time for cool heads, not emotional outbursts.”
“How the hell can you say that?” asked Ogilvie, a catch in his voice, a prelude to tears. “I’m finished.”
“That’s a harsh judgment from such a resourceful man as you. I mean it. It’s true you can’t remain here, but still your resources are immense. Act from that position of strength. Force concessions; it’s the art of survival. Eventually the authorities will see the value of your contributions as they did with Boesky, Levine and several dozen others who endure their minimal sentences playing tennis and backgammon while still possessing fortunes. Try it.”
“How?” said the lawyer, looking up at the Russian, his eyes red, pleading.
“The where comes first,” explained Sulikov. “Find a neutral country that has no extradition treaty with Washington, one where there are officials who can be persuaded to grant you temporary residence so you can carry on your business activities—the term ‘temporary’ is extremely elastic, of course. Bahrain, the Emirates, Morocco, Turkey, Greece—there’s no lack of attractive possibilities. All with rich English-speaking settlements.… We might even be able to help you, very quietly.”
“Why would you?”
“Your blindness returns, Mr. Ogilvie. For a price, naturally.… You have an extraordinary operation in Europe. It’s in place and functioning, and under our control we could derive considerable benefits from it.”
“Oh … my … God,” said the leader of Medusa, his voice trailing off as he stared at the consul general.
“Do you really have a choice, Counselor?… Come now, we must hurry. Arrangements have to be made. Fortunately, it’s still early in the day.”
It was 3:25 in the afternoon when Charles Casset walked into Peter Holland’s office at the Central Intelligence Agency. “Breakthrough,” said the deputy director, then added less enthusiastically, “Of sorts.”
“The Ogilvie firm?” asked the DCI.
“From left field,” replied Casset, nodding and placing several stock photographs on Holland’s desk. “These were faxed down from Kennedy Airport an hour ago. Believe me, it’s been a heavy sixty minutes since then.”
“From Kennedy?” Frowning, Peter studied the facsimiled duplicates. They comprised a sequence of photographs showing a crowd of people passing through metal detectors in one of the airport’s international terminals. The head of a single man was circled in red in each photo. “What is it? Who is it?”
“They’re passengers heading for the Aeroflot lounge, Moscow bound, Soviet carrier, of course. Security routinely photographs U.S. nationals taking those flights.”
“So? Who is he?”
“Ogilvie himself.”
“What?”
“He’s on the two o’clock nonstop to Moscow.… Only he’s not supposed to be.”
“Come again?”
“Three separate calls to his office came up with the same information. He was out of the country, in London, at the Dorchester, which we know he isn’t. However, the Dorchester desk confirmed that he was booked but hadn’t arrived, so they were taking messages.”
“I don’t understand, Charlie.”
“It’s a smoke screen and pretty hastily contrived. In the first place, why would someone as rich as Ogilvie settle for Aeroflot when he could be on the Concorde to Paris and Air France to Moscow? Also, why would his office volunteer that he was either in or on his way to London when he was heading for Moscow?”
“The Aeroflot flight’s obvious,” said Holland. “It’s the state airline and he’s under Soviet protection. The London-Dorchester bit isn’t too hard, either. It’s to throw people off—my God, to throw us off!”
“Right on, master. So Valentino did some checking with all that fancy equipment in the cellars and guess what?… Mrs. Ogilvie and their two teenage children are on a Royal Air Maroc flight to Casablanca with connections to Marrakesh.”
“Marrakesh?… Air Maroc—Morocco, Marrakesh. Wait a minute. In those computer sheets Conklin had us work up on the Mayflower hotel’s registers, there was a woman—one of three people he tied to Medusa—who had been in Marrakesh.”
“I commend your memory, Peter. That woman and Ogilvie’s wife were roommates at Bennington in the early seventies. Fine old families; their pedigrees ensure a large degree of sticking together and giving advice to one another.”
“Charlie, what the hell is going on?”
“The Ogilvies were tipped off and have gotten out. Also, if I’m not mistaken and if we could sort out several hundred accounts, we’d learn that millions have been transferred from New York to God knows where beyond these shores.”
“And?”
“Medusa’s now in Moscow, Mr. Director.”
34
Louis DeFazio wearily dragged his small frame out of the taxi in the boulevard Masséna, followed by his larger, heavier, far more muscular cousin Mario from Larchmont, New York. They stood on the pavement in front of a restaurant, its name in red-tubed script across a green-tinted window: Tetrazzini’s.
“This is the place,” said Louis. “They’ll be in a private room in the back.”
“It’s pretty late.” Mario looked at his watch under the wash of a street lamp. “I set the time for Paris; it’s almost midnight here.”
“They’ll wait.”
“You still haven’t told me their names, Lou. What do we call them?”
“You don’t,” answered DeFazio, starting for the entrance. “No names—they wouldn’t mean anything anyway. All you gotta do is be respectful, you know what I mean?”
“I don’t have to be told that, Lou, I really don’t,” reprimanded Mario in his soft-spoken voice. “But for my own information, why do you even bring it up?”
“He’s a high-class diplomatico,” explained the capo supremo, stopping briefly on the pavement and looking up at the man who had nearly killed Jason Bourne in Manassas, Virginia. “He operates out of Rome from fancy government circles, but he’s the direct contact with the dons in Sicily. He and his wife are very, very highly regarded, you understand what I’m saying?”
“I do and I don’t,” admitted the cousin. “If he’s so grand, why would he accept such a menial assignment as following our targets?”
“Because he can. He can go places some of our pagliacci can’t get near, you know what I mean? Also, I happen to let our people in New York know who our clients were, especially one, capisce? The dons all the way from Manhattan to the estates south of Palermo have a language they use exclusively between themselves, did you know that, cugino?… It comes down to a couple of orders: ‘Do it’ and ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
“I think I understand, Lou. We render respect.”
“Respect, yes, my fancy rendering cousin, but not no weakness, capisce? No weakness! The word’s got to go up and down the line that this is an operation Lou DeFazio took control of and ran from beginning to end. You got that?”
“If that’s the case, maybe I can go home to Angie and the kids,” said Mario, grinning.
“What?… You shut up, cugino! With this one job you got annuities for your whole passel of bambinos.”
“Not a passel, Lou, just five.”
“Let’s go. Remember, respect, but we don’t take no shit.”
The small private dining room was a miniature version of Tetrazzini’s decor. The ambience was Italian in all things. The walls were papered with dated, now faded murals of Venice, Rome and Florence; the softly piped-in music was predominantly operatic arias and tarantellas, and the lighting indirect with pockets of shadows. If a patron did not know he was in Paris, he might think he was dining on Rome’s Via Frascati, at one of the many commercialized family ristoranti lining that ancient street.
There was a large round table in the center covered by a deep red tablecloth, with a generous overhang, and four chairs equidistant from one another. Additional chairs were against the walls, allowing for an expanded conference of
principals or for the proper location of secondary subalterns, usually armed. Seated at the far end of the table was a distinguished-looking olive-skinned man with wavy dark hair; on his left was a fashionably dressed, well-coiffed middle-aged woman. A bottle of Chianti Classico was between them, the crude thick-stemmed wineglasses in front of them not the sort one would associate with such aristocratic diners. On a chair behind the diplomatico was a black leather suitcase.
“I’m DeFazio,” said the capo supremo from New York, closing the door. “This is my cousin Mario, of who you may have heard of—a very talented man who takes precious time away from his family to be with us.”
“Yes, of course,” said the aristocratic mafioso. “Mario, il boia, esecuzione garantito—deadly with any weapon. Sit down, gentlemen.”
“I find such descriptions meaningless,” responded Mario, approaching a chair. “I’m skilled in my craft, that’s all.”
“Spoken like a professional, signore,” added the woman as DeFazio and his cousin sat down. “May I order you wine, drinks?” she continued.
“Not yet,” replied Louis. “Maybe later—maybe.… My talented relative on my mother’s side, may she rest in the arms of Christ, asked a good question outside. What do we call you, Mr. and Mrs. Paris, France? Which is by way of saying I don’t need no real names.”
“Conte and Contessa is what we’re known by,” answered the husband, smiling, the tight smile more appropriate to a mask than a human face.
“See what I mean, cugino? These are people of high regard.… So, Mr. Count, bring us up to date, how about it?”
“There’s no question about it, Signor DeFazio,” replied the Roman, his voice as tight as his previous smile, which had completely disappeared. “I will bring you up to date, and were it in my powers I would leave you in the far distant past.”
“Hey, what kind of fuckin’ talk is that?”
“Lou, please!” intruded Mario, quietly but firmly. “Watch your language.”
“What about his language? What kind of language is that? He wants to leave me in some kind of dirt?”
“You asked me what has happened, Signor DeFazio, and I’m telling you,” said the count, his voice as strained as before. “Yesterday at noon my wife and I were nearly killed—killed, Signor DeFazio. It’s not the sort of experience we’re used to or can tolerate. Have you any idea what you’ve gotten yourself into?”