“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 overimaginative 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-la
w.
“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 Crédit 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.”
Epilogue
They walked along the moonlit beach, alternately touching and not touching, the embarrassment of intimacy intermittently intruding as if a world that had separated them had not let them escape its terrible orbit, constantly pulling them into its fiery nucleus.
“You carried a gun,” said Marie softly. “I had no idea you had one. I hate guns.”
“So do I. I’m not sure I knew I had one, either. It was just there.”
“Reflex? Compulsion?”
“Both, I guess. It didn’t matter, I didn’t use it.”
“But you wanted to, didn’t you?”
“Again, I’m not sure. If you and the children were threatened, of course I would, but I don’t think I’d fire indiscriminately.”
“Are you sure, David? Would the appearance of danger to us make you pick up a gun and shoot at shadows?”
“No, I don’t shoot at shadows.”
Footsteps. In the sand! Waves lapping over the
unmistakable intrusion of a human being, breaks in the flow of the natural rhythm—sounds Jason Bourne knew from a hundred beaches! He spun around, violently propelling Marie off her feet, sending her out of the line of fire as he crouched, his weapon in his hand.
“Please don’t kill me, David,” said Morris Panov, the beam of his flashlight illuminating the area. “It simply wouldn’t make sense.”
“Jesus, Mo!” cried Webb. “What were you doing?”
“Trying to find you, that’s all.… Would you please help Marie?”
Webb did so, pulling his wife to her feet, both half blinded by the flashlight. “My God, you’re the mole!” cried Jason Bourne, raising his weapon. “You knew every move I was making!”
“I’m what?” roared the psychiatrist, throwing down his flashlight. “If you believe that, gun me down, you son of a bitch!”
“I don’t know, Mo. I don’t know anything anymore …!” David’s head arched back in pain.
“Then cry your heart out, you bastard! Cry like you’ve never cried before! Jason Bourne is dead, cremated in Moscow, and that’s the way it is! You either accept that or I don’t want a goddamned thing to do with you anymore! Have you got that, you arrogant, brilliant creation! You did it, and it’s over!”
Webb fell to his knees, the tears welling in his eyes, trembling and trying not to make a sound.
“We’re going to be okay, Mo,” said Marie, kneeling beside her husband, holding him.
“I know that,” acknowledged Panov, nodding in the glow of the grounded flashlight. “Two lives in one mind, none of us can know what it’s like. But it’s over now. It’s really over.”
For Bobbi and Leonard Raichert,
two lovely people who have enriched
our lives—Our Thanks