Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Ultimatum

"I'll tell you whether you have or not," shot back Bourne, his eyes angry as he started across the sand, adding in a loud voice without looking around, "I'm going to have a dozen questions for you, and I hope to Christ you can answer them!"

St. Jacques tensed, taking a step forward but stopped by his sister. "Leave it alone, Bro," said Marie, her hand on his arm. "He's frightened."

"He's what? He's one nasty son of a bitch is what he is!"

"Yes, I know."

The brother looked at his sister. "That stranger you were talking about yesterday at the house?"

"Yes, only now it's worse. That's why he's frightened."

"I don't understand."

"He's older, Johnny. He's fifty now and he wonders if he can still do the things he did before, years ago-in the war, in Paris, in Hong Kong. It's all gnawing at him, eating into him, because he knows he's got to be better than he ever was."

"I think he can be."

"I know he will be, for he has an extraordinary reason going for him. A wife and two children were taken from him once before. He barely remembers them, but they're at the core of his torment; Mo Panov believes that and I do, too. ... Now, years later, another wife and two children are threatened. Every nerve in him has to be on fire."

Suddenly, from three hundred feet away on the beach, Bourne's voice erupted, splitting through the breezes from the sea. "Goddamn it, I told you to hurry! ... And you, Mr. Expert, there's a reef out here with the color of a sandbar beyond it! Have you considered that?"

"Don't answer, Johnny. We'll go out to the plane."

"A sandbar? What the hell's he talking about? ... Oh, my God, I do see!"

"I don't," said Marie as they walked rapidly up the pier.

"There are reefs around eighty percent of the island, ninety-five percent where this beach is concerned. They brake the waves, it's why it's called Tranquility; there's no surf at all."

"So what?"

"So someone using a tank under water wouldn't risk crashing into a reef, but he would into a sandbar in front of a reef. He could watch the beach and the guards and crawl up when his landing was clear, lying in the water only feet from shore until he could take the guard. I never thought about that."

"He did, Bro."

Bourne sat on the corner of the desk, the two old men on a couch in front of him, his brother-in-law standing by a window fronting the beach in the unoccupied villa.

"Why would I-why would we-lie to you, monsieur?" asked the hero of France.

"Because it all sounds like a classic French farce. Similar but different names; one door opening as another closes, look-alikes disappearing and entering on cue. It smells, gentlemen."

"Perhaps you are a student of Molière or Racine ... ?"

"I'm a student of uncanny coincidence, especially where the Jackal is concerned."

"I don't think there's the slightest similarity in our appearances," offered the judge from Boston. "Except, perhaps, our ages."

The telephone rang. Jason quickly reached down and picked it up. "Yes?"

"Everything checks out in Boston," said Conklin. "His name's Prefontaine, Brendan Prefontaine. He was a federal judge of the first circuit caught in a government scam and convicted of felonious misconduct on the bench-read that as being very large in the bribery business. He was sentenced to twenty-one years and did ten, which was enough to blow him away in every department. He's what they call a functioning alcoholic, something of a character in Bean Town's shadier districts, but harmless-actually kind of liked in a warped sort of way. He's also considered very bright when he's clearheaded, and I'm told a lot of crumbs wouldn't have gone court-free and others would be doing longer jail terms if he hadn't given shrewd advice to their attorneys of record. You might say he's a behind-the-scenes storefront lawyer, the 'stores' in his case being saloons, pool halls and probably warehouses.... Since I've been where he's at in the booze terrain, he sounds straight arrow to me. He's handling it better than I ever did."

"You quit."

"If I could have managed better in that twilight zone, I might not have. There's something to be said for the grape on many occasions."

"What about his client?"

"Awesome, and our once and former judge was an adjunct professor at Harvard Law, where Gates was a student in two of his classes. No question about it, Prefontaine knows the man. ... Trust him, Jason. There's no reason for him to lie. He was simply after a score."

"You're following up on the client?"

"With all the quiet ammunition I can pull out of my personal woodwork. He's our link to Carlos.. . . The Medusa connection was a false lead, a stupid attempt by a stupid general in the Pentagon to put someone inside Gates's inner legal circle."

"You're sure of that?"

"I am now. Gates is a highly paid consultant to a law firm representing a megadefense contractor under antitrust scrutiny. He wouldn't even return Swayne's calls, which, if he did, would make him more stupid than Swayne, which he isn't."

"That's your problem, friend, not mine. If everything goes the way I intend it to go here, I don't even want to hear about Snake Lady. In fact, I can't remember ever having heard of it."

"Thanks for dumping it in my lap-and in a way I guess I mean that. Incidentally, the grammar-school notebook you grabbed from the gunslinger in Manassas has some interesting things in it."

"Oh?"

"Do you remember those three frequent fliers from the Mayflower's registry who flew into Philadelphia eight months ago and just happened to be at the hotel at the same time eight months later?"

"Certainly."

"Their names are in Swayne's Mickey Mouse loose-leaf. They had nothing to do with Carlos; they're part of Medusa. It's a mother lode of disconnected information."

"I'm not interested. Use it in good health."

"We will, and very quietly. That notebook'll be on the most wanted list in a matter of days."

"I'm happy for you, but I've got work to do."

"And you refuse any help?"

"Absolutely. This is what I've been waiting thirteen years for. It's what I said at the beginning, it's one on one."

"High Noon, you goddamn fool?"

"No, the logical extension of a very intellectual chess game, the player with the better trap wins, and I've got that trap because I'm using his. He'd smell out any deviation."

"We trained you too well, scholar."

"Thank you for that."

"Good hunting, Delta."

"Good-bye." Bourne hung up the phone and looked over at the two pathetically curious old men on the couch. "You passed a sleaze-factored muster, Judge," he said to Prefontaine. "And you, 'Jean Pierre,' what can I say? My own wife, who admits to me that you might very well have killed her without the slightest compunction, tells me that I have to trust you. Nothing makes a hell of a lot of sense, does it?"

"I am what I am, and I did what I did," said the disgraced attorney with dignity. "But my client has gone too far. His magisterial persona must come to an end in ashes."

"My words are not so well phrased as those of my learned, newfound relative," added the aged hero of France. "But I know the killing must stop; it's what my woman tried to tell me. I am a hypocrite, of course, for I am no stranger to killing, so I shall only say that this kind of killing must stop. There is no business arrangement here, no profit in the kill, only a sick madman's vengeance that demands the unnecessary death of a mother and her children. Where is the profit there? ... No, the Jackal has gone too far. He, too, must now be stopped."

"That's the most cold-blooded fucking reasoning I've ever heard!" cried John St. Jacques by the window.

"I thought your words were very well chosen," said the former judge to the felon from Paris. "Très bien."