Old Scars

Chapter 6: Memory of Pain

Jason Bourne did not sleep well that night.

He was in pain. Such excruciating pain as he had never felt before in his life. He had felt such pain in his mind, but none in his body. Not as much as this...Never as much as this...

A searing bolt of agony shot through his chest...but he did not scream...his mind was numb...his tongue too...all he could manage was a feeble groan...

And then, from the centre of all pain came the cold accent-less voice, "How does to be at the other end of the knife, Cain? Comfortable, I hope. After all we do aim to give you more comfort than the legendary Jason Bourne is rumoured to give his victims..."

The smile! The goddamn sadistic smile!!! He couldn't see it this time, the pain had blinded him, but he could feel it! Christ, could he feel it!!!

"Of course the myth has rather exploded now, hasn't it my boy? You might have realised by now this is way above the league of pathetic chameleon tricks and Red Indian play-acting. This is the world of professionals...a world where you, as I have realised, do not belong...don't you agree with me, Mr. Bourne? Don't you..."

Don't you...don't you...don't you...don't you...don't you...

The words echoed again and again until he was prepared to do anything, admit anything, to make the goddamn ringing stop...for he knew the consequences of not answering all too well...and yet the pain was so great he barely had the strength to utter another groan...

"Use the cattle-prods again...Mr. 'Cain' here knows the rules better than any of us...don't you?"

Again that goddamn phrase-'don't you'...and he knew what was coming...he knew and yet he could barely speak...barely open his mouth if he even knew where his mouth was anymore...

And once again the fresh stab of excruciating pain shot through his entire being...a blinding white light replaced his vision and his hearing as well...he felt both heat and cold, perhaps even both in that instant as earth and sky became one, or perhaps galaxies apart...

Years later, he opened his eyes, if they weren't already opened and saw a face, a blurred hazy outline starting to form...but he couldn't remember the face, couldn't remember the voice...for it was better not to acknowledge if he remembered, better to forget...

Yes, to forget...as he had forgotten so much...

"I think it's time to try the soft approach again..."

Did he know that voice?

And then the same voice, in a low monotone, almost gentle, almost tranquil, almost...sympathetic...

"I need to know everything you know about a certain Project Treadstone...and you do know something...don't you..."

"I don't...I don't..."

I don't...

And then from another life, from somebody else's life he saw the folder. And the photograph within...the crew-cut blond hair, the impassive face, the greenish grey eyes...

With a cry that spoke of the furies of a million tormented hells, Bourne sat up in his bed, gasping for air, his arms and legs frantically moving, his every sense magnified threefold, as though he were an animal trying to fend off a sudden attack. The darkness of the room enveloped him and took on a seemingly demonic aspect before his eyes...in the past, darkness had always been his ally...it now seemed to assume the role of an adversary against his mind and his senses.

It took him five minutes, five agonising minutes, to realise that his body and his senses were not under attack from foes unknown and that his body was aching all over not from wounds inflicted, from wounds imaginary. And slowly but steadily, his conscious mind awakened itself to the grim realisation that yet again, as so often before, he had been a victim of a nightmare.

Or was it just a nightmare?

Bourne got off his bed and made his way towards the window of the room. He pulled aside the curtains and stared through the sealed window of bulletproof glass into the moonlit fields of Virginia. And amidst the moderate luxury and security of this virtually impregnable fortress of the CIA, the man known in the darkest depths of the shadow world as Jason Bourne was forced to ponder upon the nature of his latest 'bad dream'.

For it had not been just a dream. There had been something, something real about it. Some critical element that inextricably linked it to reality. But what? He could not remember.

Mo Panov, his late friend and psychiatrist, had told him more than once that his memory fragments were often stimulated by a familiar sight, sound, smell, place or action. If his nightmare was indeed one such memory fragment, then where did the stimulus for it lie? What had he seen or heard recently to cause its return? He didn't know.

The trouble was that mere minutes later, he could remember next to nothing of the dream itself. Except for pain. Pain and a voice. A voice he felt he had heard somewhere before, though he had no idea when or where. Or even if he really had. Usually he was able to at least retain the salient details of a memory fragment he'd just relived, but this time he could remember nothing. Almost as though his mind had erected a wall to block that memory, if it was a memory which instinct told him it was.

Once again, he was forced to wonder what traumas had he been subjected to in the past, for his mind to erect such impenetrable barriers to his memory of them. For Panov had once theorized that his amnesia was to a certain extent reinforced by his sub-consciousness. Over the years, he had slowly and painfully recovered a few of those memories; violent and traumatic remembrances of death and loss in Southeast Asia, killings in Europe and the Far East, and a half-dozen near-death experiences including the one off the coast of Marseilles that was the trigger for his memory loss in the first place; but he had never remembered anything so physically painful and traumatic as what he had just experienced now.

He stained his mind to think about the nightmare that was in reality no nightmare at all. There had been something. Something he'd seen as well as something he'd heard. But what was it?

Only time would tell...

He sighed in defeat and sat down on his bed, staring down at his hands. He thought now not about the past but the present. Lindros had postponed their 'strategy meet' for the next day as he had an urgent appointment with the DCI. Although Bourne trusted Lindros, who had been vouched for previously by the likes of Alex Conklin himself, he still could not shake off the feeling that somehow Lindros was hiding something from him. He had still not revealed to him details of the Bernard Sebastian mission he had been sent on by Conklin all those years ago. For a mission there most certainly had been; his memory of the briefing with Conklin in Paris was testament to that. And considering the Sebastian was coming after him after all these years, it was surely essential for him, Bourne, to know what had happened between them. Lindros should have realised that. So why was he holding back the answers? The answers which only Bourne's shattered memory could otherwise provide...

Tomorrow he would confront Lindros and have the truth out of him, he resolved silently in his mind. Tomorrow, he would know...