Winter Bourne
Chapter 12 "Mirror Man"
Jason Bourne
Munich was a cold city in winter. The cold suited Jason's mood. He'd taken a circuitous route from New York to Mexico to Morocco and then to Luxemburg before taking the last leg to Germany. He'd changed his appearance and identity twice along the five day trip. The time worked in his favor since the trip to Munich had given him more time to heal.
He'd bought a dirt-cheap laptop at a shop that specialized in rebuilding computers before he'd left New York. He'd spent the majority of the trip reading the contents of the thumb drive Pamela Landy had given him. She was as thorough as he'd expected.
The content of the last file had stunned him.
Pamela had arranged for Marie's remains to be sent with an escort to Frankfurt, Germany to be buried alongside her mother. Pamela had notified Marie's brother in Jason's name, so that her brother could fly in from Paris to attend a memorial service she'd arranged. Also in Jason's name.
It had moved him. It had moved him even though he knew Pamela was a calculating CIA officer with ulterior motives and decades of experience in manipulating people.
Today was Marie's funeral service. The newspapers, still reporting on the ongoing Congressional committee investigating Treadstone and Blackbriar had picked up a local report about it. CNN had tried to interview Marie's brother, but he'd refused to speak to them. A cluster of major news organizations were already at the funeral home, wondering on the air if David Webb, once called Jason Bourne would appear.
Jason could be in Frankfurt in an hour.
He never considered going to the ceremony. He'd honored Marie's memory in the only way he could. He'd always cherish every hour he'd spent with her. Yet, just being in the same country where the name Jason Bourne was being discussed again made him feel uneasy, as if he were pushing his safety to the limit. He was in Munich because Paz was here, and he had a lead on Nicky.
Jason had to pretend that this was just another day. Without any appetite, Jason ate handfuls of uncooked whole grain oatmeal straight from the box and swallowed it down with unsweetened hot black tea. He finished breakfast with a locally grown apple. To avoid the nagging that his unconscious would start, he did his dental hygiene routine. Then he took his vitamins.
Someday perhaps he could take them without remembering that he'd killed a man using just such a simple device.
The target had been a health fanatic who was an active PETA supporter. It had been easy for Jason to think of an appropriate death, harder to set up. It had taken weeks to work out the details. Substituting the victim's vitamins with ones containing a lethal dosage of vitamin B wasn't sufficient, he'd had to make it appear that the target had purchased and handled a bottle containing a super-strong vitamin B supplement in order to make it look as if Bob had made a simple mistake in misjudging the correct dosage instead of taking a toxic dose without knowing. Then Jason had had to replace the tampered pills with the regular ones, just in case some cop suspected something was off and tested all the victim's vitamins.
Such deaths weren't unknown. Several vegetarians died every year from vitamin B overdoses as they tried to make up for the lack of meat in their diets. The cops had investigated and their coroner had reported the target's death as accidental. Conklin had been particularly pleased with the method.
To distract himself from what was happening in Frankfurt, Jason started exercising, hoping that he would wear himself from what was happening in Frankfurt. After a solid two hours of working out, sweat was running into his eyes. Jason ignored the sting of salt, pressing himself to complete another three push-ups. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, two hundred. Done. His left shoulder ached. A slight hitch in the regular smooth motion had grown more noticeable near the end of the push-ups.
Jason went into the bathroom, yanking his perspiration soaked t-shirt off to check his shoulder. These days, he avoided his reflection in the mirror. Something about the look in his own eyes disturbed him. Keeping his gaze glued onto his shoulder's reflection, he shrugged, then rotated the arm, tensing and stretching the muscles. Sore, but the kind of ache that told him it was healing. He ran a finger over the lumpy scar. It had hurt like a son of a bitch to get shot. The pain hadn't gotten any better when he'd treated the wound in Moscow. While the bullet had gone straight through his shoulder, it had done more than shred flesh and muscle. The main tendons and connective tissue that made his arm work had been damaged. Foreign materials, like the wool from his coat, had been dragged along by the bullet and embedded into the wound. He'd dug out what he could, an agonizing procedure despite the local anesthetic he'd used, but he'd left Moscow knowing he needed a doctor.
Stealing a car, he'd driven far enough outside Moscow to avoid the pursuit from the city cops. He'd then taken a series of trains and buses to Warsaw, Poland. The city had become a plastic surgery capital where middle class woman from all over the world came for cheap face-lifts and liposuction. While in Moscow, he'd stolen enough drugs to keep himself functioning while he reached his destination. It had taken him a full day to find a likely target, a surgeon who ran a well-staffed clinic. The doctor was facing divorce, with a past that the newspapers hinted was more than sordid. He was a wealthy man who would be much less wealthy when his divorce was final. Jason had liked what he found, a surgeon with loose morals and a money problem. His instincts had been sure the doctor would appreciate a chunk of money that no divorce lawyer would ever be able to find.
Despite the certainty that he'd found the right doctor, and the realization that an infection, despite his care, had set into his wound, Jason had been concerned about trusting his life to this surgeon. He'd be vulnerable while on the operating table. Yet, even without the infection, he needed the surgery or he'd be permanently crippled.
In the end, he'd gone in with a cover story as a marine parts distributor from the Netherlands. In Dutch, he'd sworn that the damage was from a fluke hunting accident that he didn't want to get back to his boss, since he was supposed to have been attending a conference on new ignition technologies. Jason didn't think the doctor believed his story, but the doctor did believe in the thick stacks of euros Jason pulled out of his bag. A promise for a similar amount wired to a new Swiss account after a successful operation sealed the deal. The doctor got a big chunk of money and Jason got a shoulder that would be fully functional. It had been worth every euro.
The doctor had warned him that it would take time to heal. Jason had pushed it, unable to wait longer than six weeks before launching himself back into the world to track down Treadstone's creators and to find his own past. It had been Simon Ross's articles in the British left-wing paper, The Guardian, that had brought Jason out of hiding so soon. Ross's articles had been like an earthquake under his feet - the world had literally changed for him that day. His life as Jason Bourne and the dirty work he'd done for the CIA had been exposed to the world. Jason had known immediately what had happened, that someone inside Treadstone had talked to Ross. It had started him on the path to find the truth about himself and begun the deconstruction of Blackbriar.
The truth. The cost had been higher than he'd ever thought. Now, after everything he'd gone through since the day he'd met Simon Ross, a sore shoulder was nothing.
I'm ready now, ready for whatever will come, Jason told himself. Escaping his conscious control, his gaze darted up to check the truth of those words in the mirror.
No. Jason's mouth dried. He recognized that look. A look he'd worn since he'd lost Marie. He wrenched his gaze away from what the mirror revealed; a deep blankness was waiting for him behind those eyes. A comforting blanket of nothingness, a retreat ready to fold over his mind and hide the aching consequences of knowing. He'd thought that regaining his memory would make his life better. Recovering his memories had been nothing like what he'd expected.
He knew who he'd been. Remembered that he'd once been a man called David Webb. Yet instead of seamless memories, instead of becoming that younger self, all he had were memories like flip-cards of scenes from another life, more like still pictures from a half-remembered movie than anything he could emotionally attach to. A bike he'd received one Christmas when he was very young. Roller-skating across the concrete floor of a green painted house, but he couldn't remember his room or the city he'd grown up in. Standing in a room with his hand over his heart taking an oath of service for the US Army. Snatches of faces, of voices. He couldn't describe his mother's face, but he knew that he'd recognize her picture. He knew that she was gone, like his father, but couldn't remember why.
The clearest memories where the ones he least wanted. Those nightmarish days in New York City where he'd stopped being David Webb. It was odd now to know that his younger, more innocent self could have felt such passion, such a desire to serve. It seemed more incredible that David Webb had continued to trust people who'd tortured him. That he'd accepted self-immolation as a necessity.
His memories as Jason Bourne? God. Worse. They were much worse than he feared when he tried to knit together the loose threads with Marie. A sensation, an internal pressure that made his stomach clench and heave as those fatal memories, pricked with regret and guilt as sharp as any blade, overwhelmed him. Shuddering, he fought a sudden internal battle no less fierce and intense than any hand-to-hand combat with another human.
He drifted there, before the mirror, struggling against an enemy he couldn't name, but knowing that if he lost, he'd never resurface from the blackness that urged him to drown in nothingness.
Marie. Jason breathed her name, an anchor thrown out in desperation to hold back the waves sweeping him away. Her voice, murmuring soft reassurances in the dark of a hot Goa night, '... someday, you'll remember something good'.
A flash of another woman's face, a girl with caramel hair and deep brown eyes. Unexpected sweetness plucked from a life otherwise barren of kindness.
Nicky.
A sacrifice made.
A debt owed.
The determination to save that one life shifted the balance in this fight of conscience against memory. He was stronger now than he'd been the day he'd plunged off Wombosi's yacht. Knew what he was, what he'd done, but knew too that forgiveness was possible. Another memory made that more than a wish. Nicky's hand, gentle on his, revealing her sympathy even after witnessing the ugly way he'd killed Desh.
Another woman's face. Pamela Landy sitting across from him, earnest, her own fears near the surface. Near to begging for help. Another sacrificed life.
It was wrong to give in. A betrayal. Other people are depending on me. He couldn't lost this fight and lose himself again.
No. I will not forget again. It was an oath.
A patchwork made strong by an active will exerted its own pressure. An internal lid clamped down. Panting, Jason forced himself straight. Met his own eyes in the reflection without flinching.
A tight nod. A commitment made.
Jason turned away from the mirror. No more running away.
Time to find Paz.