“You were … what?” Gates was barely audible, his thin voice tremulous.
“Yes. Odd, isn’t it? I imagine that when this man in Paris tried to reach you here in Boston, someone told him your imperial presence was out or away and that’s how the mix-up began. Two brilliant legal minds, both with an elusive connection to a woman and her two children, and Paris thought I was you.”
“What happened?”
“Calm down, Randy. At the moment he probably thinks you’re dead.”
“What?”
“He tried to have me killed—you killed. For transgression.”
“Oh, my God!”
“And when he finds out you’re very much alive and eating well in Boston, he won’t permit a second attempt to fail.”
“Jesus Christ …!”
“There may be a way out, Dandy Boy, which is why you must come and see me. Incidentally, I’m in the same suite at the Ritz that you were in when I came to see you. Three-C; just take the elevator. Be here in thirty minutes, and remember, I have little patience with clients who abuse schedules, for I’m a very busy man. By the way, my fee is twenty thousand dollars an hour or any part thereof, so bring money, Randy. Lots of it. In cash.”
* * *
He was ready, thought Bourne, studying himself in the mirror, satisfied with what he saw. He had spent the last three hours getting ready for his drive to Argenteuil, to a restaurant named Le Coeur du Soldat, the message center for a “blackbird,” for Carlos the Jackal. The Chameleon had dressed for the environment he was about to enter; the clothes were simple, the body and the face less so. The first required a trip to the secondhand stores and pawn shops in Montmartre, where he found faded trousers and a surplus French army shirt, and an equally faded small combat ribbon that denoted a wounded veteran. The second, somewhat more complex, demanded hair coloring, a day’s growth of beard, and another constricting bandage, this bound around his right knee so tight he could not forget the limp he had quickly perfected. His hair and eyebrows were now a dull red—dirty, unkempt red, which fit his new surroundings, a cheap hotel in Montparnasse whose front desk wanted as little contact as possible with its clientele.
His neck was more an irritant now than an impediment; either he was adjusting to the stiff, restricted movement or the healing process was doing its mysterious work. And that restricted movement was not a liability where his current appearance was concerned; in truth, it was an asset. An embittered wounded veteran, a discarded son of France, would be hard pressed to forget his dual immobility. Jason shoved Bernardine’s automatic into his trousers pocket, checked his money, his car keys, and his scabbarded hunting knife, the latter purchased at a sporting goods store and strapped inside his shirt, and limped to the door of the small, filthy, depressing room. Next stop, the Capucines and a nondescript Peugeot in an underground garage. He was ready.
Out on the street, he knew he had to walk a number of blocks before he found a taxi station; cabs were not the fashion in this section of Montparnasse.… Neither was the commotion around a newspaper kiosk at the second corner. People were shouting, many waving their arms, clutching papers in their fists, anger and consternation in their voices. Instinctively, he quickened his pace, reached the stand, threw down his coins and grabbed a newspaper.
The breath went out of him as he tried to suppress the shock waves that swept through him. Teagarten killed! The assassin, Jason Bourne! Jason Bourne! Madness, insanity! What had happened? Was it a resurrection of Hong Kong and Macao? Was he losing what was left of his mind? Was he in some nightmare so real he had entered its dimensions, the horror of demented sleep, the fantasy of conjured, improvised terror turned into reality? He broke away from the crowd, reeled across the pavement, and leaned against the stone wall of a building, gasping for air, his neck now in pain, trying desperately to find a reasonable train of thought. Alex! A telephone!
“What happened?” he screamed into the mouthpiece to Vienna, Virginia.
“Come down and stay cold,” said Conklin in a low monotone. “Listen to me. I want to know exactly where you are. Bernardine will pick you up and get you out. He’ll make the arrangements and put you on the Concorde to New York.”
“Wait a minute—wait a minute!… The Jackal did this, didn’t he?”
“From what we’re told, it was a contract from a crazy jihad faction out of Beirut. They’re claiming it was their kill. The actual executioner is unimportant. That may be true and it may not. At first I didn’t buy it, not after DeSole and Armbruster, but the numbers add up. Teagarten was forever sounding off about sending NATO forces into Lebanon and leveling every suspected Palestinian enclave. He’s been threatened before; it’s just that the Medusa connection is too damned coincidental for me. But to answer your question, of course it was the Jackal.”
“So he laid it on me, Carlos laid it on me!”
“He’s an ingenious fucker, I’ll say that for him. You come after him and he uses a contract that freezes you in Paris.”
“Then we turn it around!”
“What the hell are you talking about? You get out!”
“No way. While he thinks I’m running, hiding, evading—I’m walking right into his nest.”
“You’re nuts! You get out while we can still get you out!”
“No, I stay in. Number one, he figures I have to in order to reach him, but, as you say, he’s locked me in ice. He thinks that after all these years I’ll panic in my fashion and make stupid moves—God knows I made enough on Tranquility—but so stupid here that his army of old men will find me by looking in the right places and knowing what to look for. Christ, he’s good! Shake the bastard up so he’ll make a mistake. I know him, Alex. I know the way he thinks and I’ll outthink him. I’ll stay on course, no prolonged safe cave for me.”
“Cave? What cave?”
“A figure of speech, forget it. I was in place before the news of Teagarten. I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay, you’re a fruitcake! Get out!”
“Sorry, Saint Alex, this is exactly where I want to be. I’m going after the Jackal.”
“Well, maybe I can move you off that place you’re clinging to. I spoke to Marie a couple of hours ago. Guess what, you aging Neanderthal? She’s flying to Paris. To find you.”
“She can’t!”
“That’s what I said, but she wasn’t in a listening mode. She said she knew all the places you and she used when you were running from us thirteen years ago. That you’d use them again.”
“I have. Several. But she mustn’t!”
“Tell her, not me.”
“What’s the Tranquility number? I’ve been afraid to call her—to be honest, I’ve tried like hell to put her and the kids out of my mind.”
“That’s the most reasonable statement you’ve made. Here it is.” Conklin recited the 809 area code number, and the instant he had done so, Bourne slammed down the phone.
Frantically, Jason went through the agonizing process of relaying destination and credit card numbers, accompanied by the beeps and stutters of an overseas call to the Caribbean, and, finally, after subduing some idiot at the front desk of Tranquility Inn, got through to his brother-in-law.
“Get Marie for me!” he ordered.
“David?”
“Yes … David. Get Marie.”
“I can’t. She’s gone. She left an hour ago.”
“Where to?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. She chartered a plane out of Blackburne, but she wouldn’t tell me what international island she was going to. There’s only Antigua or Martinique around here, but she could have flown to Sint Maarten or Puerto Rico. She’s on her way to Paris.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped her?”
“Christ, I tried, David. Goddamn it, I tried!”
“Did you ever think about locking her up?”
“Marie?”
“I see what you mean.… She can’t get here until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
“Have you he
ard the news?” cried St. Jacques. “General Teagarten was killed and they say it was Jason—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Bourne, replacing the phone and leaving the booth, walking down the street to collect what thoughts he could generate.
Peter Holland, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to his feet behind his desk and roared at the crippled man seated in front of him. “Do nothing? Have you lost your fucking senses?”
“Did you lose yours when you issued that statement about a joint British-American operation in Hong Kong?”
“It was the goddamned truth!”
“There are truths, and then again there are other truths, such as denying the truth when it doesn’t serve the service.”
“Shit! Fairy politicians!”
“I’d hardly say that, Genghis Khan. I’ve heard of such men going to the wall, accepting execution rather than betraying the current truth they had to live by.… You’re off base, Peter.”
Exasperated, Holland sank back into his chair. “Maybe I really don’t belong here.”
“Maybe you don’t, but give yourself a little more time. Maybe you’ll become as dirty as the rest of us; it could happen, you know.”
The director leaned back, arching his head over the chair; he spoke in a broken cadence. “I was dirtier than any of you in the field, Alex. I still wake up at night seeing the faces of young men staring at me as I ripped a knife up their chests, taking their lives away, somehow knowing that they had no idea why they were there.”
“It was either you or them. They would have put a bullet in your head if they could have.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” The DCI shot forward, his eyes locked with Conklin’s. “But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?”
“You might say it’s a variation on the theme.”
“Cut the horseshit.”
“It’s a musician’s term. I like music.”
“Then get to the main symphonic line, Alex. I like music, too.”
“All right. Bourne’s disappeared. He told me that he thinks he’s found a cave—his word, not mine—where he’s convinced he can track the Jackal. He didn’t say where it is, and God knows when he’ll call me again.”
“I sent our man at the embassy over to the Pont-Royal, asking for Simon. What they told you is true. Simon checked in, went out, and never came back. Where is he?”
“Staying out of sight. Bernardine had an idea, but it blew up in his face. He thought he could quietly close in on Bourne by circulating the license number of the rental car, but it wasn’t picked up at the garage and we both agree it won’t be. He doesn’t trust anybody now, not even me, and considering his history, he has every right not to.”
Holland’s eyes were cold and angry. “You’re not lying to me, are you, Conklin?”
“Why would I lie at a time like this, about a friend like this?”
“That’s not an answer, it’s a question.”
“Then no, I’m not lying. I don’t know where he is.” And, in truth, Alex did not.
“So your idea is to do nothing.”
“There’s nothing we can do. Sooner or later he’ll call me.”
“Have you any idea what a Senate investigating committee will say a couple of weeks or months down the road when all this explodes, and it will explode? We covertly send a man known to be ‘Jason Bourne’ over to Paris, which is as close to Brussels as New York is to Chicago—”
“Closer, I think.”
“Thanks, I need that.… The illustrious commander of NATO is assassinated with said ‘Jason Bourne’ taking credit for the kill, and we don’t say a goddamned thing to anybody! Jesus, I’ll be cleaning latrines on a tugboat!”
“But he didn’t kill him.”
“You know that and I know that, but speaking of his history, there’s a little matter of mental illness that’ll come out the minute our clinical records are subpoenaed.”
“It’s called amnesia; it has nothing to do with violence.”
“Hell, no, it’s worse. He can’t remember what he did.”
Conklin gripped his cane, his wandering eyes intense. “I don’t give a goddamn what everything appears to be, there’s a gap. Every instinct I have tells me Teagarten’s assassination is tied to Medusa. Somehow, somewhere, the wires crossed; a message was intercepted and a hell of a diversion was put in a game plan.”
“I believe I speak and understand English as well as you do,” said Holland, “but right now I can’t follow you.”
“There’s nothing to follow, no arithmetic, no line of progression. I simply don’t know.… But Medusa’s there.”
“With your testimony, I can pull in Burton on the Joint Chiefs, and certainly Atkinson in London.”
“No, leave them alone. Watch them, but don’t sink their dinghies, Admiral. Like Swayne’s ‘retreat,’ the bees will flock to the honey sooner or later.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“What I said when I came in here. Do nothing; it’s the waiting game.” Alex suddenly slammed his cane against the table. “Son of a bitch, it’s Medusa. It has to be!”
The hairless old man with a wrinkled face struggled to his feet in a pew of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Step by difficult step he made his painful way to the second confessional booth on the left. He pulled back the black curtain and knelt in front of the black latticework covered with black cloth, his legs in agony.
“Angelus domini, child of God,” said the voice from behind the screen. “Are you well?”
“Far better for your generosity, monseigneur.”
“That pleases me, but I must be pleased more than that, as you know.… What happened in Anderlecht? What does my beloved and well-endowed army tell me? Who has presumed?”
“We have dispersed and worked for the past eight hours, monseigneur. As near as we can determine, two men flew over from the United States—it is assumed so, for they spoke only American English—and took a room in a pension de famille across the street from the restaurant. They left the premises within minutes after the assault.”
“A frequency-detonated explosive!”
“Apparently, monseigneur. We have learned nothing else.”
“But why? Why?”
“We cannot see into men’s minds, monseigneur.”
Across the Atlantic Ocean, in an opulent apartment in Brooklyn Heights with the lights of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge seductively pulsating beyond the windows, a capo supremo lounged in an overstuffed couch, a glass of Perrier in his hand. He spoke to his friend sitting across from him in an armchair, drinking a gin and tonic. The young man was slender, dark-haired and striking.
“You know, Frankie, I’m not just bright, I’m brilliant, you know what I mean? I pick up on nuances—that’s hints of what could be important and what couldn’t—and I got a hell of sense. I hear a spook paisan talk about things and I put four and four together and instead of eight, I get twelve. Bingo! It’s the answer. There’s this cat who calls himself ‘Bourne,’ a creep who makes like he’s a major hit man but who isn’t—he’s a lousy esca, bait to pull in someone else, but he’s the hot cannoli we want, see? Then the Jew shrink, being very under the weather, spits out everything I need. This cannoli’s got only half a head, a testa balzana; a lot of the time he don’t know who he is, or maybe what he does, right?”
“That’s right, Lou.”
“And there this Bourne is in Paris, France, a couple of blocks away from a real big impediment, a fancy general the quiet boys across the river want taken out, like the two fatsoes already planted. Capisce?”
“I capisco, Lou,” said the clean-cut young man from the chair. “You’re real intelligent.”
“You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, you zabaglione. I could be talking to myself, so why not?… So I get my twelve and I figure let’s slam the loaded dice right into the felt, see?”
“I see, Lou.”
?
??We got to eliminate this asshole general because he’s the impediment to the fancy crowd who needs us, right?”
“Right on, Lou. An imped—an imped—”
“Don’t bother, zabaglione. So I say to myself, let’s blow him away and say the hot cannoli did it, got it?”
“Oh, yeah, Lou. You’re real intelligent.”
“So we get rid of the impediment and put the cannoli, this Jason Bourne, who’s not all there, in everybody’s gun sights, right? If we don’t get him, and this Jackal don’t get him, the federals will, right?”
“Hey, that’s terrific, Lou. I gotta say it, I really respect you.”
“Forget respect, bello ragazzo. The rules are different in this house. Come on over and make good love to me.”
The young man got up from the chair and walked over to the couch.
Marie sat in the back of the plane drinking coffee from a plastic cup, trying desperately to recall every place—every hiding and resting place—she and David had used thirteen years ago. There were the rock-bottom cafés in Montparnasse, the cheap hotels as well; and a motel—where was it?—ten miles outside of Paris, and an inn with a balcony in Argenteuil where David—Jason—first told her he loved her but could not stay with her because he loved her—the goddamned ass! And there was the Sacré-Coeur, far up on the steps where Jason—David—met the man in a dark alley who gave them the information they needed—what was it, who was he?
“Mesdames et messieurs,” came the voice over the flight deck’s loudspeaker. “Je suis votre capitaine. Bienvenu.” The pilot continued first in French, then he and his crew repeated the information in English, German, Italian and, finally with a female interpreter, in Japanese. “We anticipate a very smooth flight to Marseilles. Our estimated flight time is seven hours and fourteen minutes, landing on or before schedule at six o’clock in the morning, Paris time. Enjoy.”
The moonlight outside bathed the ocean below as Marie St. Jacques Webb looked out the window. She had flown to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and taken the night flight to Marseilles, where French immigration was at best a mass of confusion and at worst intentionally lax. At least that was the way it was thirteen years ago, a time she was reentering. She would then take a domestic flight to Paris and she would find him. As she had done thirteen years ago, she would find him. She had to! As it had been thirteen years ago, if she did not, the man she loved was a dead man.