The Bourne ultimatum

42

Sundown, and the out islands of Montserrat were growing darker, becoming patches of deep green surrounded by a shimmering blue sea and never-ending sprays of white foam erupting from coral reefs off the shorelines; all were bathed in the diaphanous orange of the Caribbean horizon. On Tranquility Isle, lamps were gradually turned on inside the last four villas in the row above the beach at Tranquility Inn, and figures could be seen, by and large walking slowly between the rooms and out on the balconies where the rays from the setting sun washed over the terraces. The soft breezes carried the scents of hibiscus and poinciana across the tropical foliage as a lone fishing boat weaved its way through the reefs with its late-afternoon catch for the inn’s kitchen.

Brendan Patrick Pierre Prefontaine carried his Perrier out to the balcony of Villa Seventeen, where Johnny St. Jacques stood by the railing sipping a rum and tonic. “How long do you think it will take before you reopen?” asked the former judge of the Boston court, sitting down at the white wrought-iron table.
“The structural damage can be repaired in a matter of weeks,” replied the owner of Tranquility Inn, “but the aftertaste of what happened here will take longer, a lot longer.”
“Again, how long?”
“I’ll give it four or five months before I send out the initial brochures—it’ll be late for the season’s bookings, but Marie agrees. To do anything earlier would not only be tasteless, but the urgency would fuel all the gossip again. ... Terrorists, drug runners, corrupt island government—we don’t need that and we don’t deserve it.”
“Well, as I mentioned, I can pay my freight,” said the once honorable justice of the federal district court in Massachusetts. “Perhaps not to the extent of your highest seasonal prices, dear man, but certainly sufficient to cover the costs of a villa, plus a little for the inn’s kitty.”
“I told you, forget it. I owe you more than I can ever repay. Tranquility’s yours as long as you want to stay.” St. Jacques turned from the railing, his eyes lingering on the fishing boat below, and sat down opposite Prefontaine. “I worry about the people down there, in the boats and on the beach. I used to have three or four boats bringing in the freshest fish. Now I’ve only got one coming in for us and what’s left of the staff all of whom are on half salary.”
“Then you need my money.”
“Come on, Judge, what money? I don’t want to appear intrusive, but Washington gave me a pretty complete rundown on you. You’ve been living off the streets for years.”
“Ah, yes, Washington,” pronounced Prefontaine, raising his glass to the orange-and-azure sky. “As usual, it is twelve steps behind the crime—twenty steps where its own criminality is concerned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Randolph Gates, that’s what I’m talking about—who I’m talking about.”
“That bastard from Boston? The one who put the Jackal on David’s trail?”
“The touchingly reformed Randolph Gates, Johnny. Reformed in all ways but monetary restitution, I might add. ... Still, nevertheless, with the mind and the conscience that I knew at Harvard years ago. Not the brightest, not the best, but with the literary and oratorical skills that camouflaged a brilliance that was never really there.”
“Now what the hell are you talking about?”
“I visited him the other day at his rehabilitation center in Minnesota, or Michigan, I can’t actually remember which, for I flew first class and the drinks were delivered on request. Regardless, we met and our arrangement was concluded. He’s changing sides, Johnny. He’s now going to fight—legally—for the people, not for the conglomerates who buy and sell on paper. He told me he’s going after the raiders and the merger brokers who make billions in the markets and cost thousands upon thousands in jobs.”
“How can he do that?”
“Because he was there. He did it all; he knows all the tricks and is willing to commit his considerable talents to the cause.”
“Why would he do it?”
“Because he’s got Edith back.”
“Who in God’s name is Edith?”
“His wife. ... Actually, I’m still in love with her. I was from the time we first met, but in those days a distinguished judge with a wife and a child, regardless of how repulsive both might be, did not pursue such longings. Randy the Grand never deserved her; perhaps now he’ll make up for all the lost years.”
“That’s very interesting, but what’s it got to do with your arrangement?”
“Did I mention that Lord Randolph of Gates made great sums of money during those lost but productive years?”
“Several times. So?”
“Well, in recognition of the services I rendered that undoubtedly contributed to the removal of a life-threatening situation in which he found himself, said threat emanating from Paris, he saw clearly the validity of compensating me. Especially in light of the knowledge I possess. ... You know, after a number of bloodletting courtroom battles, I think he’s going after a judgeship. Far higher than mine, I think.”
“So?”
“So, if I keep my own counsel, get out of Boston, and for the sake of a loose tongue stay off the sauce, his bank will forward me fifty thousand dollars a year for the rest of my life.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“That’s what I said to myself when he agreed. I even went to Mass for the first time in thirty-odd years.”
“Still, you won’t be able to go home again.”
“Home?” Prefontaine laughed softly. “Was it really? No matter, I may have found another. Through a gentleman named Peter Holland at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was given an introduction to your friend Sir Henry Sykes over in Montserrat, who in turn introduced me to a retired London barrister named Jonathan Lemuel, originally a native islander. We’re both getting on, but neither of us is ready for a different sort of ‘home.’ We may open a consulting firm, specialists in American and UK laws where export and import licensing is concerned. Of course, we’ll have to do some boning up, but we’ll manage. I expect I’ll be here for years.”
St. Jacques rose quickly from the table to replenish his drink, his eyes warily on the former, disbarred judge.

Morris Panov walked slowly, cautiously out of his bedroom and into the sitting room of Villa Eighteen, where Alex Conklin sat in a wheelchair. The bandages across the psychiatrist’s chest were visible under the light fabric of his white guayabera; they extended down his exposed left arm below the elbow. “It took me damn near twenty minutes to lift this useless appendage through the sleeve!” he complained angrily but without self-pity.
“You should have called me,” said Alex, spinning himself around in the chair, away from the telephone. “I can still roll this thing pretty damned fast. Of course, I had a couple of years’ experience prior to my Quasimodo’s boot.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to dress myself—as I believe you preferred to walk by yourself once the prosthesis was fitted.”
“That’s the first lesson, Doctor. I expect there’s something about it in your head books.”
“There is. It’s called dumb, or, if you like, obstinate stupidity.”
“No, it’s not,” countered the retired intelligence officer, his eyes leveled with Panov’s as the psychiatrist lowered himself slowly into a chair.
“No ... it’s not,” agreed Mo, returning Conklin’s look. “The first lesson is independence. Take as much as you can handle and keep grabbing for more.”
“There’s a good side, too,” said Alex, smiling and adjusting the bandage around his throat. “It gets easier, not harder. You learn new tricks every day; it’s surprising what our little gray cells come up with.”
“Do tell? I must explore that field one day. ... I heard you on the phone, who was it?”
“Holland. The wires have been burning on all the back channels between Moscow and Washington, every covert phone on both sides damn near paralyzed thinking there could be a leak and theirs would be held responsible.”
“Medusa?”
“You never heard that name, I never heard that name, and nobody we know has ever heard it. There’s been enough bloodletting in the international marketplace—to say nothing of a few buckets of real blood spilled—to call into question the sanity of both governments’ controlling institutions, which were obviously blind or just plain stupid.”
“How about just plain guilty?” asked Panov.
“Too few at the top to warrant the destruction of the whole—that’s the verdict of Langley and Dzerzhinsky Square. The chief pin-stripers at the State Department in the Kremlin’s Council of Ministers agree. Nothing can be served by pursuing or exposing the extent of the malfeasance—how do you like that, malfeasance? Murder, assassination, kidnapping, extortion and large-scale corruption using organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic are now conveniently slotted as ‘malfeasance’! They say it’s better to salvage what we can as quietly and as expeditiously as possible.”
“That’s obscene.”
“That’s reality, Doctor. You’re about to witness one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history, certainly among powerful sovereign nations. ... And the real obscenity is that they’re probably right. If Medusa were exposed to the fullest—and it would be fully exposed if it was exposed at all—the people in their righteous indignation would throw the bastards out—many of them the wrong bastards, tainted only by association. That sort of thing produces vacuums in high places, and these are not the times for vacuums of any kind. Better the Satans you know than the ones you don’t who come later.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“Trade off,” said Conklin pensively. “The scope of Medusa’s operations is so far-ranging geographically and structurally that it’s almost impossible to unravel. Moscow’s sending Ogilvie back with a team of financial analysts, and with our own people they’ll start the process of dismantling. Eventually Holland foresees a quiet, unannounced economic minisummit, calling together various financial ministers of the NATO and Eastern bloc countries. Wherever Medusa’s assets can be self-sustaining or absorbed by their individual economies, that’ll be the case with restrictive covenants on all parties. The main point is to prevent financial panics through mass factory closings and wholesale company collapses.”
“Thus burying Medusa,” offered Panov. “It’s again history, unwritten and unacknowledged, the way it was from the beginning.”
“Above all, that,” conceded Alex. “By omission and commission there’s enough sleaze to go around for everybody.”
“What about men like Burton on the Joint Chiefs, and Atkinson in London?”
“No more than messengers and fronts; they’re out for reasons of health, and believe me, they understand.”
Panov winced as he adjusted his uncomfortable wounded body in the chair. “It hardly compensates for his crimes, but the Jackal served a purpose of sorts, didn’t he? If you hadn’t been hunting him, you wouldn’t have found Medusa.”
“The coincidence of evil, Mo,” said Conklin. “I’m not about to recommend a posthumous medal.”
“I’d say it’s more than coincidence,” interrupted Panov, shaking his head. “In the final analysis, David was right. Whether forced or leaped upon, a connection was there after all. Someone in Medusa had a killer or killers using the name of ‘Jason Bourne’ assassinate a high-visibility target in the Jackal’s own backyard; that someone knew what he was doing.”
“You mean Teagarten, of course.”
“Yes. Since Bourne was on Medusa’s death list, our pathetic turncoat, DeSole, had to tell them about the Treadstone operation, perhaps not by name but its essentials. When they learned that Jason—David—was in Paris, they used the original scenario: Bourne against the Jackal. By killing Teagarten the way they did, they accurately assumed they were enlisting the most deadly partner they could find to hunt down and kill David.”
“We know that. So?”
“Don’t you see, Alex? When you think about it, Brussels was the beginning of the end, and at the end, David used that false accusation to tell Marie he was still alive, to tell Peter Holland that he was still alive. The map circling Anderlecht in red.”
“He gave hope, that’s all. Hope isn’t something I put much trust in, Mo.”
“He did more than give hope. That message made Holland prepare every station in Europe to expect Jason Bourne, assassin, and to use every extreme to get him back here.”
“It worked. Sometimes that kind of thing doesn’t.”
“It worked because weeks ago a man called Jason Bourne knew that to catch Carlos there had to be a link between himself and the Jackal, a long-forgotten connection that had to be brought to the surface. He did it, you did it!”
“In a hell of a roundabout way,” admitted Conklin. “We were reaching, that’s all. Possibilities, probabilities, abstractions—it’s all we had to work with.”
“Abstractions?” asked Panov gently. “That’s such an erroneously passive term. Have you any idea what thunder in the mind abstractions provoke?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Those gray cells, Alex. They go crazy, spinning around like infinitesimal Ping-Pong balls trying to find tiny tunnels to explode through, drawn by their own inherent compulsions.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You said it yourself, the coincidence of evil. But I’d suggest another conductor—the magnet of evil. That’s what you and David created, and within that magnetic field was Medusa.”
Conklin spun around in the chair and wheeled himself toward the balcony and the descending orange glow on the horizon beyond the deep-green out islands of Montserrat. “I wish everything was as simple as you put it, Mo,” he said rapidly. “I’m afraid it’s not.”
“You’ll have to be clearer.”
“Krupkin’s a dead man.”
“What?”
“I mourn him as a friend and one hell of an enemy. He made everything possible for us, and when it was all over, he did what was right, not what was ordered. He let David live and now he’s paying for it.”
“What happened to him?”
“According to Holland, he disappeared from the hospital in Moscow five days ago—he simply took his clothes and walked out. No one knows how he did it or where he went, but an hour after he left, the KGB came to arrest him and move him to the Lubyanka.”
“Then they haven’t caught him—”
“They will. When the Kremlin issues a Black Alert, every road, train station, airport and border crossing is put under a microscope. The incentives are irresistible: whoever lets him out will spend ten years in a gulag. It’s just a question of time. Goddamn it.”
There was a knock on the front door and Panov called out. “It’s open because it’s easier! Come in.”
The be-blazered, immaculately dressed assistant manager, Mr. Pritchard, entered, preceded by a room-service table that he was capable of pushing while standing completely erect. He smiled broadly and announced his presence as well as his mission. “Buckingham Pritchard at your service, gentlemen. I’ve brought a few delicacies from the sea for your collegial gathering before the evening meal which I have personally attended to at the side of the chef who has been known to be prone to errors without expert guidance which I was all too happy to provide.”
“Collegial?” said Alex. “I got out of college damn near thirty-five years ago.”
“It obviously didn’t take where the nuances of English are concerned,” mumbled Morris Panov. “Tell me, Mr. Pritchard, aren’t you terribly hot in those clothes? I’d be sweating like a pig.
“No nuances there, only an unproven cliché,” muttered Conklin.
“I do not perspire, sir,” replied the assistant manager.
“I’ll bet my pension you ‘perspired’ when Mr. St. Jacques came back from Washington,” offered Alex. “Christ almighty, Johnny a ‘terrorist’!”
“The incident has been forgotten, sir,” said Pritchard stoically. “Mr. Saint Jay and Sir Henry understand that my brilliant uncle and I had only the children’s interests at heart.”
“Savvy, very savvy,” observed Conklin.
“I’ll set up the canapés, gentlemen, and check the ice. The others should be here in a matter of minutes.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Panov.

David Webb leaned against the balcony archway watching his wife as she read the last pages of a children’s story to their son. The outstanding Mrs. Cooper was dozing in a chair, her magnificent black head, crowned by a fleece of silver and gray, kept nodding above her full chest as if she expected at any moment to hear sounds from the infant Alison beyond the half-closed door that was only feet from where she was sitting. The inflections of Marie’s quiet voice matched the words of the story, confirmed by Jamie’s wide eyes and parted lips. But for an analytical mind that found music in figures, his wife might have been an actress, mused David. She had the surface attributes of that precarious profession—striking features, a commanding presence, the sine qua non that forced both men and women to fall silent and pensively appraise her when she walked down a street or entered a room.
“You can read to me tomorrow, Daddy!”
The story was over, attested to by his son jumping off the couch and Mrs. Cooper flashing her eyes open. “I wanted to read that one tonight,” said Webb defensively, moving away from the arch.
“Well, you still kind of smell,” said the boy, frowning.
“Your father doesn’t smell, Jamie,” explained Marie, smiling. “I told you, it’s the medicine the doctor said he had to use on his injuries from the accident.”
“He still smells.”
“You can’t argue with an analytical mind when it’s right, can you?” asked David.
“It’s too early to go to bed, Mommy! I might wake up Alison and she’ll start crying again.”
“I know, dear, but Daddy and I have to go over and see all your uncles—”
“And my new grandfather!” cried the child exuberantly. “Grandpa Brendan said he was going to teach me how to be a judge someday.”
“God help the boy,” interjected Mrs. Cooper. “That man dresses like a peacock flowering to mate.”
“You may go into our room and watch television,” overrode Marie quickly. “But only for a half hour—”
“Aww!”
“All right, perhaps an hour, but Mrs. Cooper will select the channels.”
“Thanks, Mommy!” cried the child, racing into his parents’ bedroom as Mrs. Cooper got out of the chair and followed him.
“Oh, I can start him off,” said Marie, getting up from the couch.
“No, Miss Marie,” protested Mrs. Cooper. “You stay with your husband. That man hurts but he won’t say anything.” She disappeared into the bedroom.
“Is that true, my darling?” asked Marie, walking to David. “Do you hurt?”
“I hate to dispel the myth of a great lady’s incontestable perceptions, but she’s wrong.”
“Why do you have to use a dozen words when one will suffice?”
“Because I’m supposed to be a scholar. We academicians never take a direct route because it doesn’t leave us any offshoots to claim if we’re wrong. What are you, anti-intellectual?”
“No,” answered Marie. “You see, that’s a simple, one-word declarative.”
“What’s a declarative?” asked Webb, taking his wife in his arms and kissing her, their lips enveloping, so meaningful to each, arousing to each.
“It’s a shortcut to the truth,” said Marie, arching her head back and looking at him. “No offshoots, no circumlocutions, just fact. As in five and five equals ten, not nine or eleven, but ten.”
“You’re a ten.”
“That’s banal, but I’ll take it. ... You are more relaxed, I can feel you again. Jason Bourne’s leaving you, isn’t he?”
“Just about. While you were with Alison, Ed McAllister called me from the National Security Agency. Benjamin’s mother is on her way back to Moscow.”
“Hey, that’s wonderful, David!”
“Both Mac and I laughed, and as we laughed I thought to myself I’d never heard McAllister laugh before. It was nice.”
“He wore his guilt on his sleeve—no, all over him. He sent us both to Hong Kong and he never forgave himself. Now you’re back and alive and free. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive him, but at least I won’t hang up on him when he calls.”
“He’d like that. As a matter of fact, I told him to call. I said you might even ask him to dinner someday.”
“I didn’t go that far.”
“Benjamin’s mother? That kid saved my life.”
“Maybe a quick brunch.”
“Take your hands off me, woman. In another fifteen seconds I’m going to throw Jamie and Mrs. Cooper out of our bedroom and demand my connubials.”
“I’m tempted, Attila, but I think Bro’s counting on us. Two feisty individuals and an over-imaginative disbarred judge are more than an Ontario ranch boy can handle.”
“I love them all.”
“So do I. Let’s go.”

The Caribbean sun had disappeared; only faint sprays of orange barely illuminated the western horizon. The flames of the glass-encased candles were steady, pointed, sending streams of gray smoke through their funnels, their glow producing warm light and comfortable shadows around the terraced balcony of Villa Eighteen. The conversation, too, had been warm and comfortable—survivors relishing their deliverance from a nightmare.
“I emphatically explained to Handy Randy that the doctrine of stare decisis has to be challenged if the times have altered the perceptions that existed when the original decisions were rendered,” expounded Prefontaine. “Change, change—the inevitable result of the calendar.”
“That’s so obvious, I can’t imagine anyone debating it,” said Alex.
“Oh, Flood-the-Gates used it incessantly, confusing juries with his erudition and confounding his peers with multiple decises.”
“Mirrors and smoke,” added Marie, laughing. “We do the same in economics. Remember, Bro, I told you that?”
“I didn’t understand a word. Still don’t.”
“No mirrors and no smoke where medicine’s involved,” said Panov. “At least not where the labs are monitored and the pharmaceutical money boys are prohibited. Legitimate advances are validated every day.”
“In many ways it’s the purposely undefined core of our Constitution,” continued the former judge. “It’s as though the Founders had read Nostradamus but didn’t care to admit their frivolity, or perhaps studied the drawings of Da Vinci, who foresaw aircraft. They understood that they could not legislate the future, for they had no idea what it would hold, or what society would demand for its future liberties. They created brilliant omissions.”
“Unaccepted as such by the brilliant Randolph Gates, if memory serves,” said Conklin.
“Oh, he’ll change quickly now,” interrupted Prefontaine, chuckling. “He was always a sworn companion of the wind, and he’s smart enough to adjust his sails when he has to buck it.”
“I keep wondering whatever happened to the truck driver’s wife, the one in the diner who was married to the man they called ‘Bronk,’ ” said the psychiatrist.
“Try to imagine a small house and a white picket fence, et cetera,” offered Alex. “It’s easier that way.”
“What truck driver’s wife?” asked St. Jacques.
“Leave it alone, Bro, I’d rather not find out.”
“Or that son-of-a-bitch army doctor who pumped me full of Amytal!” pressed Panov.
“He’s running a clinic in Leavenworth,” replied Conklin. “I forgot to tell you. ... So many, so crazy. And Krupkin. Crazy old Kruppie, elegance and all. We owe him, but we can’t help him.”
There was a moment of silence as each in his and her own way thought of a man who had selflessly opposed a monolithic system that demanded the death of David Webb, who stood by the railing staring out at the darkened sea, somehow separated in mind and body from the others. It would take time, he understood that. Jason Bourne had to vanish; he had to leave him. When?
Not now! Out of the early night, the madness began again! From the sky the roar of multiple engines broke the silence like approaching sharp cracks of lightning. Three military helicopters swooped down toward the Tranquility dock, fusillades of gunfire chewing up the shoreline as a powerful bullet speedboat swung through the reefs toward the beach. St. Jacques was on his intercom. “Shore alarm!” he screamed. “Grab your weapons!”
“Christ, the Jackal’s dead!” yelled Conklin.
“His goddamned disciples aren’t!” shouted Jason Bourne—no trace of David Webb—as he shoved Marie to the floor and took a gun out of his belt, a weapon his wife knew nothing about. “They were told he was here!”
“It’s insane!”
“That’s Carlos,” replied Jason, racing to the balcony railing. “He owns them! They’re his for life!”
“Shit!” roared Alex as he wheeled his chair furiously and pushed Panov away from the table and the lighted candles.
Suddenly a deafening loudspeaker from the lead helicopter crackled with static, followed by the words of the pilot. “You saw what we did to the beach, mon! We’ll cut you in two if you don’t stop your engine! ... That’s better, mon. Drift into shore—drift, no motor at all and both of you come on deck, your hands on the gunwale, leaning forward! Do it now!”
The searchlight beams of the two circling helicopters centered on the boat as the lead aircraft dropped to the beach, the rotors swirling up the sand, producing an outline of a threshold for its landing. Four men leaped out, their weapons trained on the drifting speedboat as the inhabitants of Villa Eighteen stood by the railing, staring in astonishment at the unbelievable scene below.
“Pritchard!” yelled St. Jacques. “Bring me the binoculars!”
“They’re in my hands, Mr. Saint Jay—oh, there they are.” The assistant manager rushed out with the powerful magnifiers and handed them to his employer. “I managed to clean the lenses, sir!”
“What do you see?” asked Bourne sharply.
“I don’t know. Two men.”
“Some army!” said Conklin.
“Give them to me,” ordered Jason, grabbing the binoculars from his brother-in-law.
“What is it, David?” shouted Marie, seeing the shock on her husband’s face.
“It’s Krupkin,” he said.

Dimitri Krupkin sat at the white wrought-iron table, his face pale—and it was his full face, as his chin beard had been removed—and refused to speak to anyone until he had finished his third brandy. Like Panov, Conklin and David Webb, he was clearly a hurt man, a wounded man, a man in considerable physical pain, which, like the others, he did not care to dwell upon, as what lay ahead was infinitely better than what he had left behind. His decidedly inferior clothes seemed to annoy him whenever he glanced down at them, but he shrugged continually in silence, the shrugs conveying the fact that soon he would be back in sartorial splendor. His first words were to the elderly Brendan Prefontaine as he appraised the former judge’s intricately laced peach guayabera above the royal-blue trousers. “I like that outfit,” he said admiringly. “Very tropical and in good taste for the climate.”
“Thank you.”
Introductions were made, and the instant they were over, a barrage of questions was hurled at the Soviet. He held up both hands, as a pope might from his balcony in St. Peter’s Square, and spoke. “I will not bore you or disturb you with the trivial details of my flight from Mother Russia, other than to say I’m aghast at the high price of corruption and will neither forget nor forgive the filthy accommodations I was forced to endure for the exorbitant sums of money I spent. ... That said, thank God for Credit Suisse and those lovely green coupons they issue.”
“Just tell us what happened,” said Marie.
“You, dear lady, are even lovelier than I had imagined. Had we met in Paris I would have whisked you away from this Dickensian ragamuffin you call a husband. My, look at your hair—glorious!”
“He probably couldn’t tell you what color it is,” said Marie, smiling. “You’ll be the threat I hold over his peasant head.”
“Still, for his age he’s remarkably competent.”
“That’s because I feed him a lot of pills, all kinds of pills, Dimitri. Now tell us, what happened?”
“What happened? They found me out, that’s what happened! They confiscated my lovely house in Geneva! It’s now an adjunct to the Soviet embassy. The loss is heartbreaking!”
“I think my wife’s talking about the peasant me,” said Webb. “You were in the hospital in Moscow and you found out what someone intended for me—namely, my execution. Then you told Benjamin to get me out of Novgorod.”
“I have sources, Jason, and errors are made in high places and I’ll incriminate no one by using names. It was simply wrong. If Nuremberg taught us all nothing else, it was that obscene commands should not be obeyed. That lesson crosses borders and penetrates minds. We in Russia suffered far, far more than anyone in America during the last war. Some of us remember that, and we will not emulate that enemy.”
“Well spoken,” said Prefontaine, raising his glass of Perrier to the Soviet. “When everything’s said and done, we’re all part of the same thinking, feeling human race, aren’t we?”
“Well,” choked Krupkin, swallowing his fourth brandy, “beyond that very attractive if overused observation, there are divisions of commitment, Judge. Not serious, of course, but nevertheless varied. For instance, although my house on the lake in Geneva is no longer mine, my accounts in the Cayman Islands remain intensely personal. Incidentally, how far are those islands from here?”
“Roughly twelve hundred miles due west,” replied St. Jacques. “A jet out of Antigua will get you there in three hours plus.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Krupkin. “When we were in the hospital in Moscow, Alex frequently spoke of Tranquility Isle and Montserrat, so I checked the map in the hospital library. Everything seems to be on course. ... Incidentally, the man with the boat, he won’t be dealt with too harshly, will he? My outrageously expensive ersatz papers are very much in order.”
“His crime was in his appearance, not in bringing you over here,” answered St. Jacques.
“I was in a hurry, it goes with running for your life.”
“I’ve already explained to Government House that you’re an old friend of my brother-in-law.”
“Good. Very good.”
“What will you do now, Dimitri?” asked Marie.
“My options are limited, I’m afraid. Our Russian bear not only has more claws than a centipede has legs, she’s also computerized with a global network. I shall have to remain buried for quite some time while I construct another existence. From birth, of course.” Krupkin turned to the owner of Tranquility Inn. “Would it be possible to lease one of these lovely cottages, Mr. St. Jacques?”
“After what you did for David and my sister, don’t give it a second thought. This house is your house, Mr. Krupkin, all of it.”
“How very kind. First, naturally, there’ll be the trip to the Caymans, where, I’m told, there are excellent tailors; then perhaps a clever little yacht and a small charter business that can be substantiated as having been moved from Tierra del Fuego or the Malvinas, some godforsaken place where a little money can produce an identity and a highly credible if obscure past. After these are set in motion, there’s a doctor in Buenos Aires who does wonders with fingerprints—quite painlessly, I’m told—and then minor cosmetic surgery—Rio has the best, you know, far better than New York—just enough to alter the profile and perhaps remove a few years. ... For the past five days and nights, I’ve had nothing to do but think and plan, enduring situations of passage I would not describe in front of the lovely Mrs. Webb.”
“You certainly have been thinking,” agreed David’s wife, impressed. “And please call me Marie. How can I hold you over the peasant’s head if I’m Mrs. Webb?”
“Ah, the adorable Marie!”
“What about these adorable plans of yours?” asked Conklin pointedly. “How long will they take to implement?”
“You of all people should ask that question?” Krupkin’s eyes were wide in disbelief.
“I think I’d better,” broke in Alex.
“You, who were instrumental in building the dossier of the greatest impersonator the international world of terrorism has ever known? The incomparable Jason Bourne?”
“If that includes me,” said Webb, “I’m out. I’m heavy into interior decorating.”
“How long, Kruppie?”
“For heaven’s sake, man, you were training a recruit for an assignment, a single mission. I’m altering a life!”
“How long?”
“You tell me, Alex. It’s my life we’re talking about now—as worthless as that life may be in the geopolitical scheme of things—it’s still my life.”
“Whatever he needs,” interrupted David Webb, the unseen image of Jason Bourne looking over his wounded shoulder.
“Two years to do it well, three years to do it better,” said Dimitri Krupkin.
“They’re yours,” said Marie.
“Pritchard,” said St. Jacques, angling his head. “Fix my drink, if you please.”