| 2:43a |
@@@@@We’ve lost the
spine—everything’s gone off
@@@@@We’ve lost the
spine—everything’s gone off the wire!”
“Calm down,” said Holland gently
“How the hell can I? Bourne’s disappeared-I mean really disappeared, if he isn’t deadAnd
there’s no trace of Marie, no word from her, and then we learn that Bernardine was killed in a
shoot-out only hours ago on the Rivoli—Christ, shot in broad daylight! And that means Jason was
there—he had to be there!”
“But since none of the dead or wounded fits his description, we can assume he got away, can’t
we?”
“We can hope, yes
“You asked for a thread,” mused the DCI“I’m not sure I can actually provide one, but I can
give you something like it
“New York?” Conklin sat forward on the couch“The answering machine? That DeFazio hood in
Brooklyn Heights?”
“We’ll get to New York, to all of that—themRight now let’s concentrate on that thread of
yours, that spine you mentioned
“I’m not the slowest kid on the block, but where is it?”
Holland leaned back in his chair, gazing first at the papers on his desk and then up at Alex
“Seventy-two hours ago, when you decided to come clean with me about everything, you said that
the idea behind Bourne’s strategy was to persuade the Jackal and this latter-day Medusa to join
forces, with Bourne as the common target, one feeding the otherWasn’t that basically the premise?
Robert Ludlum ?? THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
294
Both sides wanted him killedCarlos had two reasons—revenge and the fact that he believes
Bourne could identify him; the Medusans because Bourne had pieced together so much about
them?”
“That was the premise, yes,” agreed Conklin, nodding“It’s why I dug around and made those
phone calls, never expecting to find what I didJesus, a global cartel born twenty years ago in
Saigon, peopled by some of the biggest fish in and out of the government and the militaryIt was
the kind of pay dirt I didn’t want and wasn’t looking forI thought I might dig up maybe ten or
twelve hotshot millionaires with post-Saigon bank accounts that couldn’t bear scrutiny, but not this,
not this Medusa
“To put it as simply as possible,” continued Holland, frowning, his eyes again straying down to
the papers in front of him, then up at Alex“Once the connection was made between Medusa and
Carlos, word would be passed to the Jackal that there was a man Medusa wanted eliminated, and
cost was no objectSo far, yes?”
“The key here was the caliber and the status of those reaching Carlos,” explained Conklin
“They had to be as close to bona fide Olympians as we could find, the kind of clients the Jackal
doesn’t get and never got
“Then the name of the target is revealed—say, in a way such as ‘John Smith, once known years
ago as Jason Bourne’—and the Jackal is hookedBourne, the one man he wants dead above all
othersThat’s why the Medusans reaching Carlos had to be so solid, so above questioning that
Carlos accepts them and dismisses any sort of a trap
“Because,” added the CIA’s director, “Jason Bourne came out of Saigon’s Medusa—a fact
known to Carlos—but he never shared in the riches of the later, postwar MedusaThat’s the
background scenario, isn’t it?”
“The logic’s as clean as it can be |