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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.”
    “Good Christ !” exclaimed Casset. “ How ?”
    “Massive disinformation throughout the Far East. Whenever a killing of consequence took place, whether in Tokyo or Hong Kong, Macao or Korea—wherever—Bourne was flown there and took the credit, planting evidence, taunting the authorities, until he became a legend. For three years our man lived in a world of filth—drugs, warlords, crime, tunneling his way in with only one objective: Get to Europe and bait Carlos, threaten his contracts, force the Jackal out into the open if only for a moment, just long enough to put a bullet in his head.”
    The silence around the table was electric. DeSole broke it, his voice barely above a whisper. “What kind of man would accept an assignment like that?”
    Conklin looked at the analyst and answered in a monotone. “A man who felt there wasn’t much left to live for, someone who had a death wish, perhaps ... a decent human being who was driven into an outfit like Medusa out of hatred and frustration.” The former intelligence officer stopped; his anguish was apparent.
    “Come on, Alex,” said Valentino softly. “You can’t leave us with that.”
    “No, of course not.” Conklin blinked several times, adjusting to the present. “I was thinking how horrible it must be for him now—the memories, what he can remember. There’s a lousy parallel I hadn’t considered. The wife, the kids.”
    “What’s the parallel?” asked Casset, hunched forward, staring at Alex.
    “Years ago, during Vietnam, our man was a young foreign service officer stationed in Phnom Penh, a scholar married to a Thai woman he’d met here in graduate school. They had two children and lived on the banks of a river. ... One morning while the wife and kids were swimming, a stray jet from Hanoi strafed the area killing the three of them. Our man went crazy; he chucked everything and made his way to Saigon and into Medusa. All he wanted to do was kill. He became Delta One—no names were ever used in Medusa—and he was considered the most effective guerrilla leader in the war, as often as not fighting Command Saigon over orders as he did the enemy with death squads.”
    “Still, he obviously supported the war,” observed Valentino.
    “Outside of having no use for Saigon and the ARVN, I don’t think he gave a damn one way or another. He had his own private war and it was way behind enemy lines, the nearer Hanoi the better. I think in his mind he kept looking for the pilot who had killed his family. ... That’s the parallel. Years ago there was a wife and two kids and they were butchered in front of his eyes. Now there’s another wife and two children and the Jackal is closing in, hunting him down. That’s got to be driving him close to the edge. Goddamn it!”
    The four men at the