“That seals it!” The DCI seemed almost apoplectic. “In every area he’s a step ahead of us because he had these murders planned out beforehand!” During the short, swift drive to Langley, he’d allowed his emotions to get the better of him. Between Alex’s murder and Alonzo-Ortiz’s maneuvering, he had entered the Agency briefing in a rage. Now, presented with the forensic evidence, he was more than ready to convict.
“It’s clear that Jason Bourne has gone rogue.” The Old Man, still standing, fairly shook now. “Alexander Conklin was an old and trusted friend. I cannot remember or list the number of times he put his reputation—his very life—on the line for this organization, for his country. He was a true patriot in every sense of the word, a man of whom we were all justly proud.”
Lindros, for his own part, was considering the number of times he could remember and list when the Old Man had ranted at Conklin’s cowboy tactics, his rogue missions, his secret agendas. It was all well and good to eulogize the dead, but, he thought, in this business it was downright foolish to ignore the dangerous tendencies of agents past and present. That, of course, included Jason Bourne. He was a sort of sleeper agent, the worst kind really—one not fully under his own control. In the past, he had been activated by circumstance, not by his own choosing. Lindros knew very little about Jason Bourne, an oversight he was determined to rectify the moment this briefing was adjourned.
“If Alexander Conklin had one weakness, one blind spot, it was Jason Bourne,” the DCI went on. “Years before he met and married his current wife, Marie, he lost the whole of his first family—his Thai wife and two kids—in an attack in Phnom Penh. The man was half-mad with grief and remorse when Alex picked him up off the street in Saigon and trained him. Years later, even after Alex enlisted the aid of Morris Panov, there were problems controlling the asset—despite Dr. Panov’s regular reports to the contrary. Somehow, he too fell under the influence of Jason Bourne.
“I warned Alex over and over, I begged him to bring Bourne in to be evaluated by our team of forensic psychiatrists, but he refused. Alex, God rest his soul, could be a stubborn man; he believed in Bourne.”
The DCI’s face was slick with sweat, his eyes wide as he glanced around the room. “And what is the result of that belief? Both men have been gunned down like dogs by the very asset they sought to control. The simple truth is that Bourne is uncontrollable. And he is deadly, a poisonous viper.” The DCI slammed his fist down on the conference table. “I will not have these heinous, cold-blooded murders go unpunished. I’m authorizing a worldwide sanction drawn up, ordering Jason Bourne’s immediate termination.”
Bourne shivered, by now chilled through and through. He glanced up, played his beam over the refrigeration vent. Heading back down the center aisle, he clambered up the right-hand stack of crates, crawled his way across the top of the stacks until he came to the grate. Flipping open the switchblade, he used the spine of the blade to unscrew the grille. The soft light of dawn flowed into the interior. There appeared to be just enough room for him to squeeze through. He hoped.
He rolled his shoulders in toward his chest, squeezing himself into the aperture, and began to wriggle from side to side. All went well for the first several inches or so, and then his forward progress abruptly stopped. He tried to move but couldn’t. He was stuck. He exhaled all the air out of his lungs, allowed his upper body to go slack. He pushed with his feet and legs. A crate slid and tumbled, but he had inched forward. He lowered his legs until his feet found purchase on the crates below. Locking the heels of his shoes against the upper bar, he pushed again and again he moved. By slowly and carefully repeating this maneuver he was at last able to get his head and shoulders through. He blinked up into the candy pink sky, where fluffy clouds rose up, shifting shapes as he rolled by beneath them. Reaching up, he grabbed the corner of the roof, levered himself all the way out of the semi and onto its roof.
At the next stoplight he jumped down, tucking his lead shoulder in, rolling to cushion his fall. He rose, gained the sidewalk, dusted himself off. The street was deserted. He offered the unsuspecting Guy a brief salute as the semi drove off in a blue haze of diesel fumes.
He was on the outskirts of D.C., in the poor northeast district. Light was coming into the sky, the long shadows of dawn retreating before the sun. The hum of traffic could be heard in the distance, as well as the wail of a police siren. He breathed deeply. Beneath the urban stink, there was for him something fresh in the air, the exhilaration of freedom after the long night’s struggle to remain hidden, to remain free.
He walked until he saw the fluttering of faded red, white and blue pennants. The used-car lot was shut down for the night. He walked onto the deserted lot, chose a car at random and switched its plates with the car next to it. He jimmied the lock, opened the driver’s side door and hot-wired the ignition. A moment later, he was driving out of the lot and down the street.
He parked in front of a diner whose chrome-plated facade was a relic of the fifties. A gigantic cup of coffee sat atop the roof, its neon lights long ago burned out. Inside, it was steamy. The smell of coffee grounds and hot oil was ingrained into every surface. To his left was a long Formica counter and a row of vinyl-topped chromium stools; to his right, against the bank of sun-streaked windows, were a line of booths, each one with one of those individual jukeboxes that held the cards of all the songs that could be played for a quarter.
Bourne’s white skin was silently remarked upon by the dark faces that turned as the door shut behind him with a little tinkle of a bell. No one returned his smile. Some appeared indifferent to him, but others of a different nature seemed to interpret his presence as an evil omen of things to come.
Aware of the hostile glares, he slid into a lumpy booth. A waitress with a frizz of orange hair and a face like Eartha Kitt dropped a fly-blown menu in front of him, filled his cup with steaming coffee. Bright, overly made-up eyes in a care-worn face regarded him for a time with curiosity and something more—compassion, perhaps. “Don’t you mind the stares, sugah,” she breathed. “They’re scared of you.”
He ate an indifferent breakfast: eggs, bacon and home fries, washed down with the astringent coffee. But he needed the protein and the caffeine laid to rest his exhaustion, at least temporarily.
The waitress refilled his cup and he sipped, marking time until Lincoln Fine Tailors opened. But he was not idle. He dug out the notepad he had picked off the table in Alex’s media room, once again looked at the imprint left on the top sheet. NX 20. It had the ring of something experimental, something ominous, but really it could be anything, including a new-model computer.
Glancing up, he observed the denizens of the neighborhood drifting in and out, discussing Welfare checks, drug scores, police beatings, the sudden deaths of family members, the illness of friends in jail. This was their life, more alien to him than life in Asia or Micronesia. The atmosphere inside the diner was darkened by their rage and sorrow.
Once, a police cruiser slid slowly by like a shark skirting a reef. All motion in the diner ceased, as if this significant moment was a frame in a photographer’s lens. He turned his head away and looked at the waitress. She was watching the taillights of the cruiser disappear down the block. An audible sigh of relief swept the diner. Bourne experienced his own sense of relief. It seemed that, after all, he was in the company of fellow travelers in shadow.
His thoughts turned to the man who was stalking him. His face had an Asian cast, and yet not wholly so. Was there something familiar about it—the bold line of the nose, which was not Asian at all, or the shape of the full lips, which was very much so? Was he someone from Bourne’s past, from Vietnam? But, no, that was impossible. Judging by his appearance, he was in his late twenties at most, meaning he couldn’t have been more than five or six when Bourne had been there. Who was he, then, and what did he want? The questions continued to haunt Bourne. Abruptly, he set down his half-empty cup. The coffee was beginning to burn a hole in his stomach.
Not long after, he returned to the stolen car, switched on the radio, spun the dial until he came to a news announcer talking about the terrorism summit, followed by a brief rundown first of the national news, then the local items. First on the list were the murders of Alex Conklin and Mo Panov but, strangely, no new information was forthcoming.
“More news upcoming,” the announcer said, “but first this important message….”
“…this important message.” At that moment, the office in Paris with its view down the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe came roaring back to him, the memory sweeping away the diner and those who surrounded him. There was a chocolate-colored chair at his side from which he had just risen. In his right hand a glass of cut-crystal half full of the amber liquid. A voice, deep and rich, full of melody, was speaking, something about the time it would take to get everything Bourne needed. “Not to worry, my friend,” the voice said, the English blurred by the heavy cast of its French accent, “I’m meant to give you this important message.”
In the theater of his mind, he turned, straining to see the face of the man who had spoken, but all he saw was a blank wall. The memory had evaporated like the scent of the Scotch, leaving Bourne back, staring bleakly out the grimy windows of the broken-down diner.
A spasm of fury drove Khan to pick up his cell phone and call Spalko. It took some time, and a bit of doing on his part, but at length he was put through.
“To what do I owe this honor, Khan?” Spalko said in his ear. Listening hard, Khan heard the slight slur in his voice and determined that he had been drinking. His knowledge of the habits of his sometime employer went deeper than Spalko himself might have realized, if he’d wanted to consider it at all. He knew, for instance, that Spalko liked drink, cigarettes and women, though not necessarily in that order. His capacity for all three was immense. He thought now that if Spalko was even half as drunk as he suspected, he would have an advantage. Where Spalko was concerned, that was rare.
“The dossier you gave me appears incorrect, or at the very least incomplete.”
“And what leads you to that sorry conclusion?” The voice had instantaneously hardened, like water into ice. Too late Khan knew the language he had used had been too aggressive. Spalko might be a great thinker—a visionary even, as he doubtless considered himself—but in the bedrock of his being he operated on instinct. So he had risen from his semi-stupor to fight aggression with more of the same. He was possessed of a furious temper quite at odds with his carefully cultivated public image. But then so much of him thrived beneath the saccharine surface of his day-to-day life.
“Webb’s behavior has been curious,” Khan said softly.
“Oh? In what way?” Spalko’s voice had returned to its slurring, lazy diction.
“He hasn’t been acting like a college professor.”
“I’m wondering why it matters. Haven’t you killed him?”
“Not yet.” Khan, sitting in his parked car, watched through the window glass as a bus pulled into a stop across the street. The door opened with a sigh and people emerged: an old man, two teenage boys, a mother and her toddler son.
“Well, that’s a change of plan, isn’t it?”
“You knew I meant to toy with him first.”
“Certainly, but the question is for how long?”
There was a verbal chess match of sorts in progress, as delicate as it was fevered, and Khan could only guess at its nature. What was it about Webb? Why had Spalko decided to use him as a pawn for the double murder of the government men, Conklin and Panov? Why, for that matter, had Spalko ordered them killed? Khan had no doubt this is what had happened.
“Until I’m ready. Until he understands who’s coming for him.”
Khan’s eyes followed the mother as she put her child down on the sidewalk. The boy tottered a little as he walked and she laughed. His head tilted as he looked up at her and he laughed, too, mimicking her pleasure. She took his small hand in hers.
“You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”
Khan thought he detected a slight tautness, a tremor of intent, and all at once he wondered whether Spalko was drunk at all. Khan considered asking him why it mattered to him whether or not he killed David Webb but, after some consideration, rejected the idea, fearing it might reveal his own concerns. “No, no second thoughts,” Khan said.
“Because we’re the same under the skin, you and I. Our nostrils dilate at the scent of death.”
Lost in thought and unsure how to respond, Khan closed his cell phone. He put his hand up to the window, watched between his fingers as the woman walked her son down the street. She took tiny steps, trying as best she could to match her gait to his wobbly one.
Spalko was lying to him, Khan knew that much. Just as he had been lying to Spalko. For a moment, his eyes lost their focus and he was back in the jungles of Cambodia. He had been with the Vietnamese gunrunner for over a year, tied up in a shack like a mad dog, half-starved and beaten. The third time he had attempted to escape he had learned his lesson, beating the unconscious gunrunner’s head to a pulp with the spade-shaped head of a shovel he used to dig latrine pits. He had spent ten days living off what he could before he had been taken in by an American missionary by the name of Richard Wick. He had been given food, clothing, a hot bath and a clean bed. In exchange, he responded to the missionary’s English lessons. As soon as he was able to read, he was given a Bible, which he was required to memorize. In this way, he began to understand that in Wick’s view he was on the road to not salvation but to civilization. Once or twice, he tried to explain to Wick the nature of Buddhism, but he was very young and the concepts he’d been taught at an early age didn’t seem so well formed when they emerged from his mouth. Not that Wick would’ve been interested in any case. He held no truck with any religion that didn’t believe in God, didn’t believe in Jesus the Savior.
Khan’s eyes snapped back into focus. The mother was leading her toddler past the chrome facade of the diner with the huge coffee cup on its roof. Just beyond and across the street, Khan could see the man he knew as David Webb through the reflection-streaked glass of a car window. He had to give Webb credit; he had led Khan on a tortured path from the edge of the Conklin estate. Khan had seen the figure on the ridge road, observing them. By the time he had scrambled up there after escaping from Webb’s clever trap, he had been too late to accost the man, but with his IR field glasses, he had been able to follow Webb’s progress onto the highway. He had been ready to follow when Webb had been picked up. He watched Webb now, knowing what Spalko already knew: that Webb was a very dangerous man. A man like that surely had no concern about being the only Caucasian in the diner. He looked lonely, although Khan could not be sure, loneliness being entirely alien to him.
His gaze turned again to the mother and child. Their laughter drifted back to him, insubstantial as a dream.
Bourne arrived at Lincoln Fine Tailors in Alexandria at five minutes past nine. The shop looked like all the other independently owned businesses in Old Town; that is to say, it had a vaguely Colonial facade. He crossed the red-brick sidewalk, pushed open the door, and went inside. The public area of the shop was divided in half by a waist-high barrier made up of a counter on the left and cutting tables on the right. The sewing machines were midway back behind the counter, manned by three Latinas who did not even glance up when he entered. A thin man in shirtsleeves and open striped vest stood behind the counter frowning down at something. He had a high, domed forehead, a fringe of light brown hair, a face with sagging cheeks and muddy eyes. His glasses were pushed up onto the crown of his scalp. He had a habit of pinching his hawklike nose. He paid no attention to the door opening but looked up as Bourne approached the counter.
“Yes?” he said with an expectant air. “How can I help you?”
“You’re Leonard Fine? I saw your name on the window outside.”
“That’s me,” Fine said.
“Alex sent me.”
The tailor blinked. “Who?
”
“Alex Conklin,” Bourne repeated. “My name is Jason Bourne.” He looked around. No one was paying them the slightest attention. The sound of the sewing machines made the air sparkle and hum.
Very deliberately, Fine pulled his glasses down onto the narrow bridge of his nose. He peered at Bourne with a decided intensity.
“I’m a friend of his,” Bourne said, feeling the need to prompt the fellow.
“There are no articles of clothing here for a Mr. Conklin.”
“I don’t think he left any,” Bourne said.
Fine pinched his nose, as if he were in pain. “A friend, you say?”
“For many years.”
Without another word, Fine reached over, opened a door in the counter for Bourne to step through. “Perhaps we should discuss this in my office.” He led Bourne through a door, down a dusty corridor reeking of sizing and spray starch.
The office wasn’t much, a small cubicle with scuffed and pitted linoleum on the floor, bare pipes running from floor to ceiling, a battered green metal desk with a swivel chair, two stacks of cheap metal filing cabinets, piles of cardboard boxes. The smell of mold and mildew rose like steam from the contents of the office. Behind the chair was a small square window, so grimed it was impossible to see the alley beyond.
Fine went behind the desk, pulled out a drawer. “Drink?”
“It’s a little early,” Bourne said, “don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Fine muttered. “Now that you mention it.” He removed a gun from a drawer and aimed it at Bourne’s stomach. “The bullet won’t kill you right away, but while you’re bleeding to death, you’ll wish it had.”
“There’s no reason to get excited,” Bourne said easily.
“But there’s every reason.” the tailor said. His eyes were set close together, making him appear somewhat cross-eyed. “Conklin’s dead and I heard you did it.”