“Yes, I do.” And against the advice of his dear deceased mother, Mo decided to take advantage of the moment and forgo righteousness. “But I should explain that it was my mistake, not yours.”
“Waddaya mean?” asked the trucker, washing his hands.
“Frankly, I was hiding behind the door looking at a woman I’m trying to get away from—if that makes sense to you.”
Panov’s personal medic laughed as he dried his hands. “Whose sense wouldn’t it make? It’s the story of mankind, pal! They getcha in their clutches and whammo, they whine and you don’t know what to do, they scream and you’re at their feet. Now me, I got it different. I married a real Eur’pean, you know? She don’t speak so good English, but she’s grateful.… Great with the kids, great with me, and I still get excited when I see her. Not like these fuckin’ princesses over here.”
“That’s an extremely interesting, even visceral, statement,” said the psychiatrist.
“It’s who?”
“Nothing. I still want to get out of here without her seeing me leave. I have some money—”
“Hold the money, who is she?”
Both men went to the door and Panov pulled it back a few inches. “She’s the one over there, the blonde who keeps looking in this direction and at the front door. She’s getting very agitated—”
“Holy shit,” interrupted the short trucker. “That’s the Bronk’s wife! She’s way off course.”
“Off course? The Bronk?”
“He trucks the eastern routes, not these. What the hell is she doing here?”
“I think she’s trying to avoid him.”
“Yeah,” agreed Mo’s companion. “I heard she’s been messing around and don’t charge no money.”
“Do you know her?”
“Hell, yeah. I been to a couple of their barbecues. He makes a hell of a sauce.”
“I have to get out of here. As I told you, I have some money—”
“So you told me and we’ll discuss it later.”
“Where?”
“In my truck. It’s a red semi with white stripes, like the flag. It’s parked out front, on the right. Get around the cab and stay out of sight.”
“She’ll see me leave.”
“No she won’t. I’m goin’ over and give her a big surprise. I’ll tell her all the CBs are hummin’ and the Bronk is headin’ south to the Carolinas—at least that’s what I heard.”
“How can I ever repay you?”
“Probably with some of that money you keep talkin’ about. Not too much, though. The Bronk’s an animal and I’m a born-again Christian.” The short trucker swung back the door, nearly shoving Panov back into the wall again. Mo watched as his conspiratorial colleague approached the booth, his conspiratorial arms extended as the trucker embraced an old friend and started talking rapidly; the woman’s eyes were attentive—she was mesmerized. Panov rushed out of the men’s room, through the diner’s entrance and toward the huge red-and-white-striped truck. He crouched breathlessly behind the cab, his chest pounding, and waited.
Suddenly, the Bronk’s wife came racing out of the diner, her platinum hair rising grotesquely in the air behind her as she ran to her bright red automobile. She climbed inside and in seconds the engine roared; she continued north as Mo watched, astonished.
“How are y’doing, buddy—wherever the hell you are?” shouted the short man with no name who had not only amazingly stopped a nosebleed but had rescued him from a manic wife whose paranoid mood swings were rooted in equal parts of vengeance and guilt.
Stop it, asshole, cried Panov to himself as he raised his voice. “Over here … buddy!”
Thirty-five minutes later they reached the outskirts of an unidentified town and the trucker stopped in front of a cluster of stores that bordered the highway. “You’ll find a phone there, buddy. Good luck.”
“Are you sure?” asked Mo. “About the money, I mean.”
“Sure I’m sure,” replied the short man behind the wheel. “Two hundred dollars is fine—maybe even what I earned—but more than that corrupts, don’t it? I been offered fifty times that to haul stuff I won’t haul, and you know what I tell ’em?”
“What do you tell them?”
“I tell ’em to go piss into the wind with their poison. It’s gonna flash back and blind ’em.”
“You’re a good person,” said Panov, climbing out onto the pavement.
“I got a few things to make up for.” The door of the cab slammed shut and the huge truck shot forward as Mo turned away, looking for a telephone.
“Where the hell are you?” shouted Alexander Conklin in Virginia.
“I don’t know!” answered Panov. “If I were a patient, I’d ponderously explain that it was an extension of some Freudian dream sequence because it never happens but it happened to me. They shot me up, Alex!”
“Stay cold. We assumed that. We have to know where you are. Let’s face it, others are looking for you, too.”
“All right, all right.… Wait a minute! There’s a drugstore across the street. The sign says ‘Battle Ford’s Best,’ will that help?”
The sigh on the line from Virginia was the reply. “Yes, it does. If you were a socially productive Civil War buff rather than an insignificant shrink, you’d know it, too.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Head for the old battleground at Ford’s Bluff. It’s a national landmark; there are signs everywhere. A helicopter will be there in thirty minutes, and don’t say a goddamned thing to anybody!”
“Do you know how extreme you sound? Yet I was the object of hostility—”
“Out, coach!”
Bourne walked into the Pont-Royal and immediately approached the night concierge, peeling off a five-hundred-franc note and placing it quietly in the man’s hand. “The name is Simon,” he said, smiling. “I’ve been away. Any messages?”
“No messages, Monsieur Simon,” was the quiet reply, “but two men are outside, one on Montalembert, the other across on the rue du Bac.”
Jason removed a thousand-franc note and palmed it to the man. “I pay for such eyes and I pay well. Keep it up.”
“Of course, monsieur.”
Bourne crossed to the brass elevator. Reaching his floor, he walked rapidly down the intersecting corridors to his room. Nothing was disturbed; everything was as he had left it, except that the bed had been made up. The bed. Oh, God, he needed to rest, to sleep. He couldn’t do it any longer. Something was happening inside him—less energy, less breath. Yet he had to have both, now more than ever. Oh, Christ, he wanted to lie down.… No. There was Marie. There was Bernardine. He went to the telephone and dialed the number he had committed to memory.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Four hours late, mon ami. What happened?”
“No time. What about Marie?”
“There is nothing. Absolutely nothing. She is not on any international flight currently in the air or scheduled for departure. I even checked the transfers from London, Lisbon, Stockholm and Amsterdam—nothing. There is no Marie Elise St. Jacques Webb en route to Paris.”
“There has to be. She wouldn’t change her mind, it’s not like her. And she wouldn’t know how to bypass immigration.”
“I repeat. She’s not listed on any flight from any country coming into Paris.”
“Damn!”
“I will keep trying, my friend. The words of Saint Alex keep ringing in my ears. Do not underestimate la belle mademoiselle.”
“She’s not a goddamned mademoiselle, she’s my wife.… She’s not one of us, Bernardine; she’s not an agent in the field who can cross and double-cross and triple-cross. That’s not her. But she’s on her way to Paris. I know it!”
“The airlines do not, what more can I say?”
“Just what you said,” said Jason, his lungs seemingly incapable of absorbing the air he needed, his eyelids heavy. “Keep trying.”
“What happened tonight? Tell me.”
/>
“Tomorrow,” replied David Webb, barely audible. “Tomorrow.… I’m so tired and I have to be somebody else.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t even sound like yourself.”
“Nothing. Tomorrow. I have to think.… Or maybe I shouldn’t think.”
* * *
Marie stood in Marseilles’s immigration line, mercifully short because of the early hour, and assumed an air of boredom, the last thing she felt. It was her turn to go to the passport counter.
“Américaine,” said the half-awake official. “Are you heer on bizziness or playseeoor, madame?”
“Jeparle français, monsieur. Je suis canadienne d’origine—Québec. Séparatiste.”
“Ah, bien!” The sleepy clerk’s eyes opened somewhat wider as he proceeded in French. “You are in business?”
“No, I’m not. This is a journey of memories. My parents came from Marseilles and both died recently. I want to see where they came from, where they lived—perhaps what I missed.”
“How extraordinarily touching, lovely lady,” said the immigration official, appraising the most appealing traveler. “Perhaps also you might need a guide? There is no part of this city that is not indelibly printed on my mind.”
“You’re most kind. I’ll be at the Sofitel Vieux Port. What’s your name? You have mine.”
“Lafontaine, madame. At your service!”
“Lafontaine? You don’t say?”
“I do indeed!”
“How interesting.”
“I am very interesting,” said the official, his eyelids half closed but not with sleepiness, as his rubber stamps flew recklessly down to process the tourist. “I am at your every service, madame!”
It must run in that very peculiar clan, thought Marie as she headed for the luggage area. From there she would board a domestic flight to Paris under any name she chose.
François Bernardine awoke with a start, shooting up on his elbows, frowning, disturbed. She’s on her way to Paris, I know it! The words of the husband who knew her best. She’s not listed on any flight from any other country coming into Paris. His own words. Paris. The operative word was Paris!
But suppose it was not Paris?
The Deuxième veteran crawled rapidly out of bed in the early morning light shining through the tall narrow windows of his flat. In fewer minutes than his face appreciated, he shaved, then completed his ablutions, dressed, and walked down into the street to his Peugeot, where there was the inevitable ticket on the windshield; alas, it was no longer officially dismissible with a quiet phone call. He sighed, picked it off the glass, and climbed in behind the wheel.
Fifty-eight minutes later he swung the car into the parking lot of a small brick building in the huge cargo complex of Orly Airport. The building was nondescript; the work inside was not. It was a branch of the Department of Immigration, an all-important arm known simply as the Bureau of Air Entries, where sophisticated computers kept up-to-the-minute records of every traveler flying into France at all the international airports. It was vital to immigration but not often consulted by the Deuxième, for there were far too many other points of entry used by the people in which the Deuxième was interested. Nevertheless, over the years, Bernardine, operating on the theory of the obvious being unnoticed, had sought information from the Bureau of Air Entries. Every now and then he had been rewarded. He wondered if that would be the case this morning.
Nineteen minutes later he had his answer. It was the case, but the reward was considerably diminished in value, for the information came too late. There was a pay phone in the bureau’s lobby; Bernardine inserted a coin and dialed the Pont-Royal.
“Yes?” coughed the voice of Jason Bourne.
“I apologize for waking you.”
“François?”
“Yes.”
“I was just getting up. There are two men down in the street far more tired than I am, unless they’re replacements.”
“Relative to last night? All night?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Is that why you called?”
“No. I’m out at Orly and I’m afraid I have bad news, information that proves me an idiot. I should have considered it.… Your wife flew into Marseilles slightly over two hours ago. Not Paris. Marseilles.”
“Why is that bad news?” cried Jason. “We know where she is! We can—Oh, Christ, I see what you mean.” Subdued, Bourne’s words trailed off. “She can take a train, hire a car.…”
“She can even fly up to Paris under any name she cares to,” added Bernardine. “Still, I have an idea. It’s probably as worthless as my brain but I suggest it anyway.… Do you and she have special—how do you say it?—nicknames for each other? Sobriquets of endearment perhaps?”
“We’re not much for the cute stuff, frankly.… Wait a minute.
A couple of years ago, Jamie, that’s our son, had trouble with ‘Mommy.’ He turned it around and called her ‘Meemom.’ We kidded about it and I called her that for a few months off and on until he got it right.”
“I know she speaks French fluently. Does she read the papers?”
“Religiously, at least the financial pages. I’m not sure she goes seriously much beyond them; it’s her morning ritual.”
“Even in a crisis?”
“Especially in a crisis. She claims it calms her.”
“Let’s send her a message—on the financial pages.”
Ambassador Phillip Atkinson settled in for a morning of dreary paperwork at the American embassy in London. The dreariness was compounded by a dull throbbing at his temples and a sickening taste in his mouth. It was hardly a typical hangover because he rarely drank whisky and for over twenty-five years had never been drunk. He had learned a long time ago, roughly thirty months after Saigon fell, the limits of his talents, his opportunities and, above all, his resources. When he returned from the war with reasonable, if not exceptional, commendations at twenty-nine, his family had purchased him an available seat on the New York Stock Exchange, where in thirty additional months he had lost something over three million dollars.
“Didn’t you ever learn a goddamned thing at Andover and Yale?” his father had roared. “At least make a few connections on the Street?”
“Dad, they were all jealous of me, you know that. My looks, the girls—I look like you, Dad—they all conspired against me. Sometimes I think they were really getting at you through me! You know how they talk. Senior and Junior, dashing socialites and all that crap.… Remember the column in the Daily News when they compared us to the Fairbankses?”
“I’ve known Doug for forty years!” yelled the father. “He’s got it upstairs, one of the best.”
“He didn’t go to Andover and Yale, Dad.”
“He didn’t have to, for Christ’s sake!… Hold it. Foreign Service …? What the hell was that degree you got at Yale?”
“Bachelor of Arts.”
“Screw that! There was something else. The courses or something.”
“I majored in English literature and minored in political science.”
“That’s it! Shove the fairy stuff on the back burner. You were outstanding in the other one—the political science bullshit.”
“Dad, it wasn’t my strongest course.”
“You passed?”
“Yes.… Barely.”
“Not barely, with honors! That’s it!”
And so Phillip Atkinson III began his career in the Foreign Service by way of a valuable political contributor who was his father, and never looked back. And although that illustrious man had died eight years ago, he never forgot the old war horse’s last admonition: “Don’t fuck this up, son. You want to drink or you want to whore around, you do it inside your own house or in a goddamned desert somewhere, understand? And you treat that wife of yours, whatever the hell her name is, with real affection wherever anybody can see you, got it?”
“Yes, Dad.”
Which was why Phillip Atkinson felt so blah on this particu
lar morning. He had spent the previous evening at a dinner party with unimportant royals who drank until the drink flowed out of their nostrils, and with his wife who excused their behavior because they were royals, all of which he could tolerate only with seven glasses of Chablis. There were times when he longed for the freewheeling, free-drinking days of the old Saigon.
The telephone rang, causing Atkinson to blur his signature on a document that made no sense to him. “Yes?”
“The high commissioner from the Hungarian Central Committee is on the line, sir.”
“Oh? Who’s that—who are they? Do we recognize them—it—him?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Ambassador. I really can’t pronounce his name.”
“Very well, put him through.”
“Mr. Ambassador?” said the deep accented voice on the phone. “Mr. Atkinson?”
“Yes, this is Atkinson. Forgive me, but I don’t recollect either your name or the Hungarian affiliation you speak for.”
“It does not matter. I speak on behalf of Snake Lady—”
“Stop!” cried the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. “Stay on the line and we’ll resume talking in twenty seconds.” Atkinson reached down, snapped on his scrambler, and waited until the spiraling sounds of the pre-interceptor subsided. “All right, continue.”
“I have received instructions from Snake Lady and was told to confirm the origin from you.”
“Confirmed!”
“And therefore I am to carry out these instructions?”
“Good Lord, yes! Whatever they say. My God, look what happened to Teagarten in Brussels, Armbruster in Washington! Protect me! Do whatever they say!”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.”
Bourne first sat in the hottest tub he could endure, then took the coldest shower he could tolerate. He then changed the dressing around his neck, walked back into the small hotel room and fell on the bed.… So Marie had found a simple, ingenious way to reach Paris. Goddamn it! How could he find her, protect her? Had she any idea what she was doing? David would go out of his mind. He’d panic and make a thousand mistakes.… Oh, my God, I am David!
Stop it. Control. Pull back.
The telephone rang; he grabbed it off the bedside table. “Yes?”