"And if you want our help, we should know something besides contradictory rumors," continued the director, leaning back in his chair. "I don't know if we can help, but I do know there's little we can do so completely in the dark."

Again Alex looked at each man, the lines in his pained face more pronounced than ever, as if the decision was momentarily too agonizing for him. "I won't tell you his name because I've given my word-maybe later, not now. And it can't be found in the record, it's not there either; it's a cover-I gave my word on that, too. The rest I'll tell you because I do want your help and I want that record to remain in its black hole. ... Where do I begin?"

"With this meeting perhaps?" suggested the director. "What prompted it?"

"All right, that'll be quick." Conklin stared pensively at the surface of the table, absently gripping his cane, then raised his eyes. "A woman was killed last night at an amusement park outside Baltimore-"

"I read about it in the Post this morning," interrupted DeSole, nodding, his full cheeks jiggling. "Good Lord, were you-"

"So did I," broke in Casset, his steady brown eyes on Alex. "It happened in front of a shooting gallery. They closed the guns down."

"I saw the article and figured it was some kind of terrible accident." Valentino shook his head slowly. "I didn't actually read it."

"I was given my usual thick sheaf of scissored newspaper stories, which is enough journalism for anyone in the morning," said the director. "I don't remember any such article."

"Were you involved, old boy?"

"If I wasn't, it was a horrible waste of life. ... I should say if we weren't involved."

"We?" Casset frowned in alarm.

"Morris Panov and I received identical telegrams from Jason Bourne asking us to be at the amusement park at nine-thirty last night. It was urgent, and we were to meet him in front of the shooting gallery, but we were not, under any condition, to call his house or anyone else. ... We both independently assumed that he didn't want to alarm his wife, that he had something to tell us individually that he didn't want her to know. ... We arrived at the same time, but I saw Panov first and figured it was a bad scene. From any point of view, especially Bourne's, we should have reached each other and talked before going up there; instead, we had been told not to. It smelled, so I did my best to get us out of there fast. The only way seemed to be a diversion."

"You stampeded then," said Casset, making a statement.

"It was the only thing I could think of, and one of the few things this goddamned cane is good for other than keeping me upright. I cracked every shin and kneecap I could see and lanced a few stomachs and tits. We got out of the circle, but that poor woman was killed."

"How did you figure it-do you figure it?" asked Valentino.

"I just don't know, Val. It was a trap, no question about that, but what kind of trap? If what I thought then and what I think now are correct, how could a hired marksman miss at that distance? The shot came from my upper left-not that I necessarily heard it-but the position of the woman and the blood all over her throat indicated that she had turned and caught the bullet in her body swing. It couldn't have come from the gallery; those guns are chained and the massive hemorrhage in her neck was caused by a far larger caliber than any of the toys there. If the killer wanted to take out either Mo Panov or me, his telescopic cross hairs wouldn't be that far off the mark. Not if my thinking is right."

" 'Right,' Mr. Conklin," interjected the DCI, "meaning the assassin, Carlos the Jackal."

"Carlos?" exclaimed DeSole. "What in heaven's name has the Jackal to do with a killing in Baltimore?"

"Jason Bourne," answered Casset.

"Yes, I gather that, but this is all terribly confusing! Bourne was a scum hit man out of Asia who moved to Europe to challenge Carlos and lost. As the director just said, he went back to the Far East and was killed four or five years ago, yet Alex talks as if he's still alive, that he and someone named Panov got telegrams from him. ... What in God's name does a dead scumball and the world's most elusive assassin have to do with last night?"

"You weren't here a few minutes ago, Steve," again Casset answered quietly. "Apparently they had a lot to do with last night."

"I beg your pardon."

"I think you should start at the beginning, Mr. Conklin," said the director. "Who is Jason Bourne?"

"As the world knew him, a man who never existed," replied the former intelligence officer.

"The original Jason Bourne was garbage, a paranoid drifter from Tasmania who found his way into the Vietnam war as part of an operation no one wants to acknowledge even today. It was a collection of killers, misfits, smugglers and thieves, mostly escaped criminals, many under death sentences, but they knew every inch of Southeast Asia and operated behind enemy lines-funded by us."

"Medusa," whispered Steven DeSole. "It's all buried. They were animals, killing wantonly without reason or authorization and stealing millions. Savages."

"Most, not all," said Conklin. "But the original Bourne fitted every rotten profile you could come up with, including the betrayal of his own men. The leader of a particularly hazardous mission-hazardous, hell, it was suicidal-found Bourne radioing their position to the North Vietnamese. He executed him on the spot, shoving the body into a swamp to rot in the jungles of Tam Quan. Jason Bourne disappeared from the face of the earth."

"He obviously reappeared, Mr. Conklin," observed the director, leaning forward on the table.

"In another body," agreed Alex, nodding. "For another purpose. The man who executed Bourne in Tam Quan took his name and agreed to be trained for an operation that we called Treadstone Seventy-one, after a building on New York's Seventy-first Street, where he went through a brutal indoctrination program. It was a brilliant strategy on paper, but ultimately failed because of something no one could predict, even consider. After nearly three years of living the role of the world's second most lethal assassin and moving into Europe-as Steve accurately described-to challenge the Jackal in his own territory, our man was wounded and lost his memory. He was found half dead in the Mediterranean and brought by a fisherman to the island of Port Noir. He had no idea who he was or what he was-only that he was a master of various martial arts, spoke a couple of Oriental languages, and was obviously an extremely well-educated man. With the help of a British doctor, an alcoholic banished to Port Noir, our man started to piece his life-his identity-back together from fragments both mental and physical. It was a hell of a journey ... and we who had mounted the operation, who invented the myth, were no help to him. Not knowing what had happened, we thought he had turned, had actually become the mythical assassin we'd created to trap Carlos. I, myself, tried to kill him in Paris, and when he might have blown my head off, he couldn't do it. He finally made his way back to us only through the extraordinary talents of a Canadian woman he met in Zurich and who is now his wife. That lady had more guts and brains than any woman I've ever met. Now she and her husband and their two kids are back in the nightmare, running for their lives."

Aristocratic mouth agape, his pipe in midair in front of his chest, the director spoke. "Do you mean to sit there and tell us that the assassin we knew as Jason Bourne was an invention? That he wasn't the killer we all presumed he was?"

"He killed when he had to kill in order to survive, but he was no assassin. We created the myth as the ultimate challenge to Carlos, to draw the Jackal out."