The Bourne Ultimatum jb-3 Read online

  The strategy took nearly ten years before concrete results appeared, and while the early returns were not earthshaking, still they represented progress. Law reviews, first minor and then major, began publishing his semi-controversial articles as much for their style as for their content, for the young associate professor had a seductive way with the written word, at once riveting and arcane, by turns flowery and incisive. But it was his opinions, latently emerging, that made segments of the financial community take notice. The mood of the nation was changing, the crust of the benevolent Great Society beginning to crack, the lesions initiated with code words coined by the Nixon boys, such as the Silent Majority and Bums-on-Welfare and the pejorative them. A meanness was rising out of the ground and spreading, and it was more than the perceptive, decent Ford could stop, weakened as he was by the wounds of Watergate; and too much as well for the brilliant Carter, too consumed by minutiae to exercise compassionate leadership. The phrase "... what you can do for your country" was out of fashion, replaced by "what I can do for me."

  Dr. Randolph Gates found a relentless wave on which to ride, a mellifluous voice with which to speak, and a growing acerbic vocabulary to match the dawning new era. In his now refined scholarly opinion-legally, economically and socially-bigger was better, and more far preferable to less. The laws that supported competition in the marketplace he attacked as stifling to the larger agenda of industrial growth from which would flow all manner of benefits for everyone-well, practically everyone. It was, after all, a Darwinian world and, like it or not, the fittest would always survive. The drums went bang and the cymbals clanged and the financial manipulators found a champion, a legal scholar who lent respectability to their righteous dreams of merger and consolidation; buy out, take over and sell off, all for the good of the many, of course.

  Randolph Gates was summoned, and he ran into their arms with alacrity, stunning one courtroom after another with his elocutionary gymnastics. He had made it, but Edith Gates was not sure what it all meant. She had envisioned a comfortable living, naturally, but not millions, not the private jets flying all over the world, from Palm Springs to the South of France. Nor was she comfortable when her husband's articles and lectures were used to support causes that struck her as unrelated or patently unfair; he waved her arguments aside, stating that the cases in point were legitimate intellectual parallels. Above everything, she had not shared a bed or a bedroom with her husband in over six years.

  She walked into the study, abruptly stopping as he gasped, swerving his head around, his eyes glazed and filled with alarm.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you."

  "You always knock. Why didn't you knock? You know how it is when I'm concentrating."

  "I said I'm sorry. Something's on my mind and I wasn't thinking."

  "That's a contradiction."

  "Thinking about knocking, I mean."

  "What's on your mind," asked the celebrated attorney as if he doubted his wife had one.

  "Please don't be clever with me."

  "What is it, Edith?"

  "Where were you last night?"

  Gates arched his brows in mock surprise. "My God, are you suspicious? I told you where I was. At the Ritz. In conference with someone I knew years ago, someone I did not care to have at my house. If, at your age, you want confirmation, call the Ritz."

  Edith Gates was silent for a moment; she simply looked at her husband. "My dear," she said, "I don't give a damn if you had an assignation with the most voluptuous whore in the Combat Zone. Somebody would probably have to give her a few drinks to restore her confidence."

  "Not bad, bitch."

  "In that department you're not exactly a stud, bastard."

  "Is there a point to this colloquy?"

  "I think so. About an hour ago, just before you came home from your office, a man was at the door. Denise was doing the silver, so I answered it. I must say he looked impressive; his clothes were terribly expensive and his car was a black Porsche-"

  "And?" broke in Gates, lurching forward in the chair, his eyes suddenly wide, rigid.

  "He said to tell you that le grand professeur owed him twenty thousand dollars and 'he' wasn't where he was supposed to be last night, which I assumed was the Ritz."

  "It wasn't. Something came up. ... Oh, Christ, he doesn't understand. What did you say?"

  "I didn't like his language or his attitude. I told him I hadn't the vaguest idea where you were. He knew I was lying, but there wasn't anything he could do."

  "Good. Lying's something he knows about."

  "I can't imagine that twenty thousand is such a problem for you-"

  "It's not the money, it's the method of payment."

  "For what?"

  "Nothing."

  "I believe that's what you call a contradiction, Randy."

  "Shut up!"

  The telephone rang. Gates lunged up from the chair and stared at it. He made no move to go to the desk; instead, he spoke in a guttural voice to his wife. "Whoever it is, you tell him I'm not here. ... I'm away, out of town-you don't know when I'll be back."

  Edith walked over to the phone. "It's your very private line," she said as she picked it up on the third ring. "The Gates residence," began Edith, a ploy she had used for years; her friends knew who it was, others did not matter to her any longer. "Yes. ... Yes? I'm sorry, he's away and we don't know when he'll return." Gates's wife looked briefly at the phone, then hung up. She turned to her husband. "That was the operator in Paris. ... It's strange. Someone was calling you, but when I said you weren't here, she didn't even ask where you could be reached. She simply got off the line-very abruptly."

  "Oh, my God!" cried Gates, visibly shaken. "Something happened ... something's gone wrong, someone lied!" With those enigmatic words the attorney whipped around, and raced across the room, fumbling in his trousers pocket. He reached a section of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves where the center of the chest-high shelf had been converted into a safe-like cupboard, a carved wooden door superimposed on the brown steel. In panic, as an afterthought stunned him further, he spun around and screamed at his wife. "Get out of here! Get out, get out, get out!"

  Edith Gates walked slowly to the study door, where she turned to her husband and spoke quietly. "It all goes back to Paris, doesn't it, Randy? Seven years ago in Paris. That's where something happened, isn't it? You came back a frightened man, a man with a pain you won't share."

  "Get out of here!" shrieked the vaunted professor of law, his eyes wild.

  Edith went out the door, closing it behind her but not releasing the knob, her hand twisted so the latch would not close. Moments later she opened it barely a few inches and watched her husband.

  The shock was beyond anything she could imagine. The man she had lived with for thirty-three years, the legal giant who neither smoked nor drank a drop of alcohol, was plunging a hypodermic needle into his forearm.

  10

  Darkness had descended on Manassas, the countryside alive with nocturnal undercurrents, as Bourne crept through the woods bordering the "farm" of General Norman Swayne. Startled birds fluttered out of their black recesses; crows awoke in the trees and cawed their alarms, then, as if calmed by a foraging co-conspirator, kept silent.

  He reached it, wondering, if indeed it would be there. A fence-high, with thick crisscrossing links embedded in green plastic, a coiled-barbed-wire addition above slanting outward. Entry prohibited. Beijing. The Jing Shan Sanctuary. There had been things to conceal within that Oriental wildlife preserve, so it was protected by an all but impassable government barrier. But why would a desk-bound general on military pay erect such a barricade around a "farm" in Manassas, Virginia, an obstruction costing thousands of dollars? It was not designed to fence in livestock; it was, instead, built to keep out human life.

  As with the sanctuary in China, there would be no electric alarms threaded through the links, for the animals and the birds of the forest would set them off repeatedly. Nor would there be the unseen
beams of trip lights for the same reason; instead, they would be on the flat ground nearer the house, and waist-high, if they existed. Bourne pulled the small wire cutters out of his rear pocket and started with the links at earth level.

  With each scissoring cut, he again understood the obvious, the inevitable, confirmed by his heavy breathing and the sweat that had formed on his hairline. No matter how hard he tried-not fanatically but at least assiduously-to keep himself in reasonably good shape, he was now fifty and his body knew it. Again, it was something to think about, not dwell upon, and with every inch of progress not think about at all. There were Marie and the children, his family; there was nothing he could not do as long as he willed it. David Webb was gone from his psyche, only the predator Jason Bourne remained.

  He was through! The parallel vertical links were cut, the ground wires as well. He gripped the fence and pulled the opening toward him, making each half foot of space an ordeal. He crawled inside this strangely fortified acreage and stood up, listening, his eyes darting in every direction, scanning the darkness-which was not complete darkness. He saw-filtered through the thick branches of the tall overlapping pines bordering the tamed grounds-flickerings of light coming from the large house. Slowly, he made his way toward what he knew was the circular drive. He reached the outer border of the asphalt and lay prone beneath a spreading pine, gathering his thoughts and his breath as he studied the scene in front of him. Suddenly there was a flash of light on his far right, deep inside the grounds at the end of a straight graveled road that branched off from the circular drive.

  A door had been opened; it belonged to what appeared to be a small house or a large cabin and it remained open. Two men and a woman came out and were talking ... no, they were not just talking, they were arguing heatedly. Bourne ripped the short powerful binoculars out of their Velcro recess and put them up to his eyes. Quickly he focused on the trio, whose voices grew in volume, the words indistinguishable but the anger apparent. As the blurred image sharpened, he studied the three people, knowing instantly that the medium-sized, medium-built, ramrod-straight protesting man on the left was the Pentagon's General Swayne, and the large-breasted woman with streaked dark hair his wife, but what struck him-and fascinated him-was the hulking overweight figure nearest the open door. He knew him! Jason could not remember from where or when, which was certainly not unusual, but his visceral reaction to the sight of the man was not usual. It was one of instant loathing and he did not know why, since no connection with anything in the past came to him. Only feelings of disgust and revulsion. Where were the images, the brief flashes of time or circumstance that so often illuminated his inner screen? They did not come; he only knew that the man he focused on in the binoculars was his enemy.

  Then that huge man did an extraordinary thing. He reached for Swayne's wife, throwing his large left arm protectively around her shoulders, his right hand accusingly jabbing the space between him and the general. Whatever he said-or yelled-caused Swayne to react with what seemed to be stoic resolve mixed with feigned indifference. He turned around, and in military fashion strode back across the lawn toward a rear entrance to the house. Bourne lost him in the darkness and swung back to the couple in the light of the door. The large obese man released the general's wife and spoke to her. She nodded, brushed her lips against his, and ran after her husband. The obvious consort walked back into the small house and slammed the door shut, removing the light.

  Jason reattached the binoculars to his trousers and tried to understand what he had observed. It had been like watching a silent movie minus the subtitles, the gestures far more real and without exaggerated theatricality. That there was in the confines of this fenced acreage a ménage à trois was obvious, but this could hardly explain the fence. There was another reason, a reason he had to learn.

  Further, instinct told him that whatever it was, was linked to the huge overweight man who had walked angrily back into the small house. He had to reach that house; he had to reach that man who had been a part of his forgotten past. He slowly got to his feet, and ducking from one pine to the next, he made his way to the end of the circular drive, and then continued down the tree-lined border of the narrow graveled road.

  He stopped, lurching to the ground at a sudden sound that was no part of the murmuring woods. Somewhere wheels were spinning, crushing stone and displacing it; he rolled over and over into the dark recesses of the low-hanging, wide-spreading branches of a pine tree, swinging his body around to locate the disturbance.

  Within seconds he saw something racing out of the shadows of the circular drive, rushing over the gravel of the extended road. It was a small odd-shaped vehicle, half three-wheeled motorbike, half miniature golf cart, the tires large and deeply treaded, capable of both high speed and balance. It was also, in its way, ominous, for, in addition to a high flexible antenna, thick curved Plexiglas shields shot up from all sides, bulletproof windows that protected the driver from gunfire while alerting by radio anyone inside the residences of an assault. General Norman Swayne's "farm" took on an even stranger ambience. ... Then, abruptly, it was macabre.

  A second three-wheeled cart swung out from the shadows behind the cabin-and it was a cabin with split logs on the exterior-and came to a stop only feet from the first vehicle on the graveled road. Both drivers' heads swung militarily toward the small house as if they were robots in a public gallery, and then the words shot out from an unseen speaker.

  "Secure the gates," said the amplified voice, a voice in command. "Release the dogs and resume your rounds."

  As if choreographed, the vehicles swung in unison, each in the opposite direction, the drivers gunning their engines as one, the strange-looking carts racing forward into the shadows. At the mention of dogs Bourne had automatically reached into his back pocket and removed the CO2 gun; he then crawled laterally, rapidly, through the underbrush to within feet of the extended fence. If the dogs were in a pack, he would have no choice but to scramble up the links and spring over the coiled barbed wire to the other side. His dual-chambered dart pistol could eliminate two animals, not more; there would be no time to reload. He crouched, waiting, ready to leap up on the fence, the sightlines beneath the lower branches relatively clear.

  Suddenly a black Doberman raced by on the graveled road, no hesitation in his pace, no scent picked up, the animal's only objective apparently to reach a given place. Then another dog appeared, this a long-haired shepherd. It slowed down, awkwardly yet instinctively, as if programmed to halt at a specific area; it stopped, an obscure moving silhouette up the road. Standing motionless, Bourne understood. These were trained male attack dogs, each with its own territory, which was constantly urinated upon, forever its own turf. It was a behavioral discipline favored by Oriental peasants and small landowners who knew too well the price of feeding the animals who guarded their minuscule fiefdoms of survival. Train a few, as few as possible, to protect their separated areas from thieves, and if alarms were raised the others would converge. Oriental. Vietnam. ... Medusa. It was coming back to him! Vague, obscure outlines-images. A young, powerful man in uniform, driving a Jeep, stepping out, and-through the mists of Jason's inner screen-yelling at what was left of an assault team that had returned from interdicting an ordnance route paralleling the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That same man, older, larger, had been in his binoculars only moments ago! And years ago that same man had promised supplies. Ammunition, mortars, grenades, radios. He had brought nothing! Only complaints from Command Saigon that "you fucking illegals fed us crap!" But they hadn't. Saigon had acted too late, reacted too late, and twenty-six men had been killed or captured for nothing.

  As if it were an hour ago, a minute ago, Bourne remembered. He had yanked his .45 out of his holster and, without warning, jabbed the barrel into the approaching noncom's forehead.

  "One more word and you're dead, Sergeant." The man had been a sergeant! "You bring us our requisitions by O-five-hundred tomorrow morning or I'll get to Saigon and personally blow you into the wa
ll of whatever whorehouse you're frequenting. Do I make myself clear or do you care to save me a trip to publicity city? Frankly, in light of our losses, I'd rather waste you now."

  "You'll get what you need."

  "Très bien!" had yelled the oldest French member of Medusa, who years later would save his life in a wildlife sanctuary in Beijing. "Tu es formidable, mon fils!" How right he was. And how dead he was. D'Anjou, a man legends were written about. Jason's thoughts were abruptly shattered. The long-haired attack dog was suddenly circling in the road, its snarls growing louder, its nostrils picking up the human scent. Within seconds, as the animal found its directional bearings, a frenzy developed. The dog lunged through the foliage, its teeth bared, the snarls now the throated growls of a kill. Bourne sprang back into the fence, pulling the CO2 pistol out of its nylon shoulder holster with his right hand; his left arm crooked, extended, prepared for a vital counterassault that if not executed properly would cost him the night. The crazed animal leaped, a hurling mass of rage. Jason fired, first one cartridge and then the second, and as the darts were embedded, he whipped his left arm around the attack dog's head, yanking the skull counterclockwise, slamming his right knee up into the animal's body to ward off the lashing sharp-nailed paws. It was over in moments-moments of raging, panicked, finally disintegrating fury-without the howling sounds that might have carried across the lawn of the general's estate. The long-haired dog, its narcotized eyes wide, fell limp in Bourne's arms. He lowered it to the ground and once again waited, afraid to move until he knew that no converging inhuman alarms had been sent to the other animals.