'You're a goddamn fool!' exploded Jason. 'I can help you; you can't help me! Leave me something for Christ's sake!'
'I won't! Not that way! ...' Suddenly Marie broke off. Her lips parted. 'I think I just did,' she said, whispering.
'Did what?' asked Bourne angrily.
'Gave us both something.' She turned back to him. 'I just said it; it's been there a long time. "What others want you to believe....'
'What the hell are you talking about?'
'Your crimes ... what others want you to believe are your crimes.'
They're there. They're mine.
'Wait a minute. Suppose they were there but they weren't yours? Suppose the evidence was planted - as expertly as it was planted against me in Zurich - but it belongs to someone else. Jason, you don't know when you lost your memory.'
'Port Noir.'
That's when you began to build one, not when you lost it. Before Port Noir; it could explain so much. It could explain you, the contradiction between you and the man people think you are.'
'You're wrong. Nothing could explain the memories - the images - that come back to me.'
'Maybe you just remember what you've been told,' said Marie. 'Over and over and over again. Until there was nothing else. Photographs, recordings, visual and aural stimuli.'
'You're describing a walking, functioning vegetable who's been brainwashed. That's not me.'
She looked at him, speaking gently. 'I'm describing an intelligent, very ill man whose background conformed with what other men were looking for. Do you know how easily such a man might be found? They're in hospitals everywhere, in private sanatoriums, in military wards.' She paused, then continued quickly. That newspaper article told another truth. I'm reasonably proficient with computers; anyone doing what I do would be. If I were looking for a curve-example that incorporated isolated factors, I'd know how to do it Conversely, if someone was looking for a man suffering from amnesia, whose background incorporated specific skills, languages, racial characteristics, the medical data banks could provide candidates. God knows, not many in your case; perhaps only a few, perhaps only one. But one man was all they were looking for, all they needed'
Bourne glanced at the countryside, trying to pry open the steel doors of his mind, trying to find a semblance of the hope she felt 'What you're saying is that I'm a reproduced illusion,' he said, making the statement flatly.
That's the end effect, but it's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's possible you've been manipulated. Used. It would explain so much.' She touched his hand. 'You tell me there are times when things want to burst out of you - blow your head apart* 'Words - places, names - they trigger things.' 'Jason, isn't it possible they trigger the false things? The things you've been told over and over again, but you can't relive. You can't see them clearly, because they're not you.' 'I doubt it I've seen what I can do. I've done them before.' 'You could have done them for other reasons! ... Goddamn you, I'm fighting for my life! For both our lives! ... All right! You can think and feel. Think now, feel now! Look at me and tell me you've looked inside yourself, inside your thoughts and feelings, and you know without a doubt you're an assassin called Cain! If you can do that - really do that - then bring me to Zurich, take the blame for everything, and get out of my life! But if you can't, stay with me and let me help you. And love me, for God's sake. Love me, Jason.' Bourne took her hand, holding it firmly, as one might an
angry, trembling child. 'It's not a question of feeling or thinking. I saw the account at the Gemeinschaft; the entries go back a long time. They correspond with all the things I've learned.'
'But that account, those entries, could have been created yesterday, or last week, or six months ago! Everything you've heard and read about yourself could be part of a pattern designed by those who want you to take Cain's place! You're not Cain, but they want you to think you are, want others to think you are! But there's someone out there who knows you're not Cain and he's trying to tell you ... I have my proof, too. My lover's alive, but two friends are dead because they got between you and the one who's sending you the message, who's trying to save your life. They were killed by the same people who want to sacrifice you to Carlos in place of Cain ... You said before that everything fitted. It didn't, Jason, but this does! It explains you.'
'A hollow shell who doesn't even own the memories he thinks he has? With demons running around inside kicking hell out of the walls? It's not a pleasant prospect.
'Those aren't demons, my darling. They're parts of you, angry, furious, screaming to get out because they don't belong in the shell you've given them.'
'And if I blow that shell apart, what'll I find?'
'Many things.' Some good, some bad, a great deal that's been hurt But Cain won't be there, I promise you that I believe in you, my darling. Please don't give up.'
He kept his distance, a glass wall between them. 'And if we're wrong? Finally wrong? What then?'
'Leave me quickly. Or kill me. I don't care.'
'I love you.'
'I know. That's why I'm not afraid.'
'I found two telephone numbers hi Lavier's office. The first was for Zurich, the other here in Paris. With any luck, they can lead me to the one number I need.'
'New York? Treadstone?'
'Yes. The answer's there. If I'm not Cain, someone at that number knows who I am.'
They drove back to Paris on the assumption that they would be far less obvious among the crowds of the city than in an isolated country inn. A blond-haired man wearing tortoise-shell glasses and a striking but stern-faced woman, devoid of make-up and with her hair pulled back like an intense graduate student at the Sorbonne, were not out of place in Montmartre. They took a room at the Terrasse on the rue de Maistre, registering as a married couple from Brussels.
In the room, they stood for a moment, no words necessary for what each was seeing and feeling. They came together, touching, holding, closing out the abusive world that refused them peace, that kept them balancing on taut wires next to each other, high above a dark abyss; if either fell, it was the end for both.
Bourne could not change his colour for the immediate moment It would be false, and there was no room for artifice. 'We need some rest,' he said. 'We've got to get some sleep. It's going to be a long day.'
They made love. Gently, completely, each with the other in the warm, rhythmic comfort of the bed. And there was a moment, a foolish moment, when adjustment of an angle was breathlessly necessary and they laughed. It was a quiet laugh, at first even an embarrassed laugh, but the observation was there, the appraisal of foolishness intrinsic to something very deep between them. They held each other more fiercely when the moment passed, more and more intent on sweeping away the awful sounds and the terrible sights of a dark world that kept them spinning in its winds. They were suddenly breaking out of that world, plunging into a much better one where sunlight and blue water replaced the darkness. They raced towards it feverishly, furiously, and then they burst through and found it.