Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Ultimatum

He reached the shrubbery. And at the moment he heard a massive smashing of glass followed by yet another fusillade-this time so prolonged that the entire magazine had to have been emptied. He had not been seen; the figure by the window had backed away to reload, his concentration on that task, not on the possibility of an escape. Carlos, too, was growing old and losing his finesse, thought Jason Bourne. Where were the flares intrinsic to such an operation? Where were the alert, roving eyes that loaded weapons in total darkness?

Darkness. A cloud cover blocked the yellow rays of the moon; there was darkness. He vaulted over the fence, concealing himself behind the shrubbery, then raced to the first of the two trees where he could stand upright, view the scene and consider his options.

Something was wrong. There was a primitiveness he could not associate with the Jackal. The assassin had isolated the terminal, ad valorem, and the price was high, but there was an absence of the finer points of the deadly equation. The subtlety was not there; instead, there was a brute force, hardly to be denied, but not when employed against the man they called Jason Bourne who had escaped from the trap.

The figure by the shattered window had spent his ammunition; he reeled back against the building, pulling another magazine out of his pocket. Jason raced out of the cover of the trees, his MAC-10 on automatic fire, exploding the dirt in front of the killer, then circling the bullets around his frame.

"That's it!" he shouted, closing in on the assassin. "You're dead, Carlos, with one pull of my finger-if you are the Jackal!"

The man by the shattered window threw down his weapon. "I am not he, Mr. Bourne," said the executioner from Larchmont, New York. "We've met before, but I am not the person you think I am."

"Hit the ground, you son of a bitch!" The killer did so as Jason approached. "Spread your legs and your arms!" The command was obeyed. "Raise your head!"

The man did so, and Bourne stared at the face, vaguely illuminated by the distant glow of the amber lights on the airfield's runway. "You see now?" said Mario. "I'm not who you think I am."

"My God," whispered Jason, his incredulity all too apparent. "You were in the driveway in Manassas, Virginia. You tried to kill Cactus, then me!"

"Contracts, Mr. Bourne, nothing more."

"What about the tower? The air controller here in the tower!"

"I do not kill indiscriminately. Once the plane from Poitiers was given clearance to land, I told him to leave. ... Forgive me, but your wife was also on the list. Fortunately, as she is a mother, it was beyond my abilities."

"Who the hell are you?"

"I just told you. A contract employee."

"I've seen better."

"I'm not, perhaps, in your league, but I serve my organization well."

"Jesus, you're Medusa!"

"I've heard the name, but that's all I can tell you. ... Let me make one thing clear, Mr. Bourne. I will not leave my wife a widow, or my children orphans for the sake of a contract. That position simply isn't viable. They mean too much to me."

"You'll spend a hundred and fifty years in prison, and that's only if you're prosecuted in a state that doesn't have the death penalty."

"Not with what I know, Mr. Bourne. My family and I will be well taken care of-a new name, perhaps a nice farm in the Dakotas or Wyoming. You see, I knew this moment had to come."

"What's come now, you bastard, is that a friend of mine inside there is shot up! You did it!"

"A truce, then?" said Mario.

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"I have a very fast car a half mile away." The killer from Larchmont, New York, pulled a square instrument from his belt. "It can be here in less than a minute. I'm sure the driver knows the nearest hospital."

"Do it!"

"It's done, Jason Bourne," said Mario, pressing a button.

Morris Panov had been rolled into the operating room; Louis DeFazio was still on a gurney, as it was determined that his wound was superficial. And through back-channel negotiations between Washington and Quai d'Orsay, the criminal known only as Mario was securely in the custody of the American embassy in Paris.

A white-frocked doctor came out into the hospital's waiting room; both Conklin and Bourne got to their feet, frightened. "I will not pretend to be a bearer of glad tidings," said the physician in French, "for it would be quite wrong. Both lungs of your friend were punctured, as well as the wall of his heart. He has at best a forty-sixty chance of survival-against him, I'm afraid. Still, he is a strong-willed man who wants to live. At times that means more than all the medical negatives. What else can I tell you?"

"Thank you, Doctor." Jason turned away.

"I have to use a telephone," said Alex to the surgeon. "I should go to our embassy, but I haven't the time. Do I have any guarantee that I won't be tapped, overheard?"

"I imagine you have every guarantee," replied the physician. "We wouldn't know how to do it. Use my office, please."

"Peter?"

"Alex!" cried Holland from Langley, Virginia. "Everything go all right? Did Marie get off?"

"To answer your first question, no, everything did not go all right; and as far as Marie goes, you can expect a panicked phone call from her the minute she reaches Marseilles. That pilot won't touch his radio."

"What?"

"Tell her we're okay, that David's not hurt-"

"What are you talking about?" broke in the director of Central Intelligence.

"We were ambushed while waiting for the plane from Poitiers. I'm afraid Mo Panov's in bad shape, so bad I don't want to think about it right now. We're in a hospital and the doctor's not encouraging."

"Oh, God, Alex, I'm sorry."

"In his own way, Mo's a fighter. I'll still bet on him. Incidentally, don't tell Marie. She thinks too much."

"Of course not. Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes, there is, Peter. You can tell me why Medusa's here in Paris."

"In Paris? It's not according to everything I know and I know a hell of a lot."

"Our identification's positive. The two guns that hit us an hour ago were sent over by Medusa. We've even got a confession of sorts."

"I don't understand!" protested Holland. "Paris never entered into our thinking. There's no linkage in the scenario."

"Sure, there is," contradicted the former station chief. "You said it yourself. You called it a self-fulfilling prophecy, remember? The ultimate logic that Bourne conceived as a theory. Medusa joining up with the Jackal, the target Jason Bourne."

"That's the point, Alex. It was only a theory, hypothetically convincing, but still just a theory, the basis for a sound strategy. But it never happened."

"It obviously did."

"Not from this end. As far as we're concerned, Medusa's now in Moscow."

"Moscow?" Conklin nearly dropped the phone on the doctor's desk.

"That's right. We've concentrated on Ogilvie's law firm in New York, tapping everything that could be tapped. Somehow-and we don't know how-Ogilvie was tipped off and got out of the country. He took an Aeroflot to Moscow, and the rest of his family headed to Marrakesh."

"Ogilvie ... ?" Alex could barely be heard; frowning, his memory peeled away the years. "From Saigon? A legal officer from Saigon?"

"That's right. We're convinced he runs Medusa."

"And you withheld that information from me?"

"Only the name of the firm. I told you we had our priorities and you had yours. For us, Medusa came first."

"You simple swab jockey!" exploded Conklin. "I know Ogilvie-more precisely, I knew him. Let me tell you what they called him in Saigon: Ice-Cold Ogilvie, the smoothest-talking legal scumball in Vietnam. With a few subpoenas and some research, I could have told you where a few of his courtroom skeletons were buried-you blew it! You could have pulled him in for fixing the army courts in a couple of killings-there are no statutes, civilian or military, on those crimes. Jesus, why didn't you tell me?"