20
   Stunned, Marie stared at the television set, at the satellite news program beamed from Miami. Then she screamed as a camera moved in on a glass table in a town called Anderlecht in Belgium and the name printed in red across the top. "Johnny!"
   St. Jacques burst through the bedroom door of the suite he had built for himself on the second floor of Tranquility Inn. "Christ, what is it?"
   Tears streaming down her face, Marie pointed in horror at the set. The announcer on the overseas "feed" was speaking in the monotonic drone peculiar to such satellite transmissions.
   "... as if a bloodstained savage from the past had returned to terrorize civilized society. The infamous killer, Jason Bourne, second only to Carlos the Jackal in the assassin for-hire market, has claimed responsibility for the explosion that took the lives of General James Teagarten and his companions. Conflicting reports have come from Washington and London intelligence circles and police authorities. Sources in Washington claim that the assassin known as Jason Bourne was hunted down and killed in Hong Kong five years ago in a joint British-American operation. However, spokesmen for both the Foreign Office and British intelligence deny any knowledge of such an operation and say that a joint effort as was described is highly unlikely. Still other sources, these from Interpol's headquarters in Paris, have stated that their branch in Hong Kong knew of the supposed death of Jason Bourne, but as the widely circulated reports and photographs were so sketchy and unidentifiable, they did not give much credence to the story. They assumed, as was also reported, that Bourne disappeared into the People's Republic of China for a last contract fatal to himself. All that's clear today is that in the quaint city of Anderlecht in Belgium, General James Teagarten, commander of NATO, was assassinated and someone calling himself Jason Bourne has taken credit for killing this great and popular soldier. ... We now show you an old composite photograph from Interpol's files produced by a consensus of those who purportedly had seen Bourne at close range. Remember, this is a composite, the features put together separately from scores of other photographs and, considering the killer's reputation for changing his appearance, probably not of great value."
   The screen was suddenly filled with the face of a man, somewhat irregular and lacking definition.
   "It's not David!" said John St. Jacques.
   "It could be, Bro," said his sister.
   "And now to other news. The drought that has plagued large areas of Ethiopia-"
   "Turn that goddamned thing off!" shouted Marie, lurching out of the chair and heading for the telephone as her brother switched off the set. "Where's Conklin's number? I wrote it down here on your desk somewhere. ... Here it is, on the blotter. Saint Alex has a hell of a lot to explain, that son of a bitch!" She dialed angrily but accurately, sitting in St. Jacques's chair, tapping her clenched fist as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. Tears of sorrow and fury. "It's me, you bastard! ... You've killed him! You let him go-helped him to go-and you've killed him!"
   "I can't talk to you now, Marie," said a cold, controlled Alexander Conklin. "I've got Paris on the other line."
   "Screw Paris! Where is he? Get him out!"
   "Believe me, we're trying to find him. All fucking hell has broken out here. The British want Peter Holland's ass for even hinting at a Far East connection, and the French are in an up roar over something they can't figure out but suspect, like special Deuxième cargo on a plane from Martinique, which was originally rejected. I'll call you back, I swear it!"
   The line was disconnected, and Marie slammed down the phone. "I'm flying to Paris, Johnny," she said, breathing deeply and wiping the tears from her face.
   "You're what?"
   "You heard me. Bring Mrs. Cooper over here. Jamie loves her and she's better with Alison than I could ever be-and why not? She's had seven children, all grown up who still come back to her every Sunday."
   "You're crazy! I won't let you!"
   "Somehow," said Marie, giving her brother a withering look, "I have an idea you probably said something like that to David when he told you he was going to Paris."
   "Yes, I did!"
   "And you couldn't stop him any more than you can stop me."
   "But why?"
   "Because I know every place he knows in Paris, every street, every café, every alley, from Sacré-Coeur to Montmartre. He has to use them, and I'll find him long before the Deuxième or the Sûreté." The telephone rang; Marie picked it up.
   "I told you I'd call you right back," said the voice of Alex Conklin. "Bernardine has an idea that might work."
   "Who's Bernardine?"
   "An old Deuxième colleague and a good friend who's helping David."
   "What's his idea?"
   "He got Jason-David-a rental car. He knows the license-plate number and is having it radioed to all the Paris police patrols to report it if seen, but not to stop the car or harass the driver. Simply keep it in sight and report directly to him."
   "And you think David-Jason-won't spot something like that? You've got a terrible memory, worse than my husband's."
   "It's only one possibility, there are others."
   "Such as?"
   "Well ... well, he's bound to call me. When he hears the news about Teagarten, he's got to call me."
   "Why?"
   "Like you say, to get him out!"
   "With Carlos in the offing? Fat chance, fathead. I've got a better idea. I'm flying to Paris."
   "You can't!"
   "I don't want to hear that anymore, I won't hear that anymore. Are you going to help me or do I do it by myself?"
   "I couldn't get a postage stamp from a dispensing machine in France, and Holland couldn't get the address of the Eiffel Tower."
   "Then I'm on my own, which, frankly, under the circumstances, makes me feel a lot safer."
   "What can you do, Marie?"
   "I won't give you a litany, but I can go to all those places he and I went to, used when we were running. He'll use them again, somehow, some way. He has to because in your crazy jargon they were 'secure,' and in his crazy frame of mind he'll return to them because he knows they're secure."
   "God bless, favorite lady."
   "He abandoned us, Alex. God doesn't exist."
   Prefontaine walked through the terminal at Boston's Logan Airport to the crowded platform and raised his hand to hail a cab. But after looking around, he lowered his hand and stood in line; things had changed in thirty years. Everything, including airports, had become cafeterias; one stood in line for a plate of third-rate mulligan stew, as well as for a taxi.
   "The Ritz-Carlton," said the judge to the driver.
   "You h'ain'd got no luggage?" asked the man. "Nudding but d'liddle bag?"
   "No, I do not," replied Prefontaine and, unable to resist a follow-up added, "I keep wardrobes wherever I go."
   "Tutti-fruitee," said the driver, removing an outsized, wide-toothed comb from his hair as he swung out into the traffic.
   "You have a reservation, sir?" asked the tuxedoed clerk behind the counter at the Ritz.
   "I trust one of my law clerks made it for me. The name's Scofield, Justice William Scofield of the Supreme Court. I'd hate to think that the Ritz had lost a reservation, especially these days when everyone's screaming for consumer protection."
   "Justice Scofield ... ? I'm sure it's here somewhere, sir."
   "I specifically requested Suite Three-C, I'm sure it's in your computer."
   "Three-C ... it's booked-"
   "What?"
   "No, no, I'm wrong, Mr. Justice. They haven't arrived ... I mean it's an error ... they're in another suite." The clerk pounded his bell with ferocity. "Bellboy, bellboy!"
   "No need for that, young fella, I travel light. Just give me the key and point me in the right direction."
   "Yes, sir!"
   "I trust you've got a few bottles of decent whisky up there, as usual?"
   "If they're not, they will be, Mr. Justice. Any particular brands?"
   "Good rye, good bourbon and good brandy. The white stuff is for sissies, right?"
   "Right, sir. Right away, sir!"
   Twenty minutes later, his face washed and a drink in his hand, Prefontaine picked up the phone and dialed Dr. Randolph Gates.
   "The Gates residence," said the woman on the line.
   "Oh, come on, Edie, I'd know your voice under water and it's been almost thirty years."
   "I know yours, too, but I simply can't place it."
   "Try a rough adjunct professor at the law school who kept beating the hell out of your husband, which made no impression upon him and he was probably right because I ended up in jail. The first of the local judges to be put away, and rightfully so."
   "Brendan? Dear God, it's you! I never believed all those things they said about you."
   "Believe, my sweet, they were true. But right now I have to speak to the lord of the Gates. Is he there?"
   "I suppose he is, I don't really know. He doesn't speak to me very much anymore."
   "Things are not well, my dear?"
   "I'd love to talk to you, Brendan. He's got a problem, a problem I never knew about."
   "I suspect he has, Edie, and of course we'll talk. But at the moment I have to speak with him. Right now."
   "I'll call him on the intercom."
   "Don't tell him it's me, Edith. Tell him it's a man named Blackburne from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean."
   "What?"
   "Do as I say, dear Edie. It's for his sake as well as yours-perhaps more for you, if truth were told."
   "He's sick, Brendan."
   "Yes, he is. Let's try to make him well. Get him on the line for me."
   "I'll put you on hold."
   The silence was interminable, the two minutes more like two hours until the graveled voice of Randolph Gates exploded on the line. "Who are you?" whispered the celebrated attorney.
   "Relax, Randy, it's Brendan. Edith didn't recognize my voice, but I sure remembered hers. You're one lucky fellow."
   "What do you want? What's this about Montserrat?"
   "Well, I just came back from there-"
   "You what?"
   "I decided I needed a vacation."
   "You didn't ... !" Gates's whisper was now essentially a cry of panic.
   "Oh, but I did, and because I did your whole life is going to change. You see, I ran into the woman and her two children that you were so interested in, remember them? It's quite a story and I want to tell it to you in all its fascinating detail. ... You set them up to be killed, Dandy Randy, and that's a no-no. A dreadful no-no."
   "I don't know what you're talking about! I've never heard of Montserrat or any woman with two children. You're a desperate sniveling drunk and I'll deny your insane allegations as the alcoholic fantasies of a convicted felon!"
   "Well done, Counselor. But denying any allegations made by me isn't the core of your dilemma. No, that's in Paris."
   "Paris ... ?"
   "A certain man in Paris, someone I didn't realize was a living person, but I learned otherwise. It's somewhat murky how it came about, but a strange thing happened in Montserrat. I was mistaken for you."
   "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 re stricted 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 heard 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. "Jesuis votre capitaine. Bienvenu. "The pilot continued first in French, then he and his crew repeated the in formation 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.

22
   Bourne walked for nearly an hour through the streets of Paris trying to clear his head, ending up at the Seine, on the Pont de Solferino, the bridge that led to the Quai des Tuileries and the gardens. As he leaned against the railing absently watching the boats lazily plowing the waters below, the question kept assaulting him: Why, why, why? What did Marie think she was doing? Flying over to Paris! It wasn't just foolish, it was stupid-yet his wife was neither a fool nor an idiot. She was a very bright lady with reserves of control and a quick, analytical mind. That was what made her decision so untenable; what could she possibly hope to accomplish? She had to know he was far safer working alone rather than worrying about her while tracking the Jackal. Even if she found him, the risk was doubled for both of them, and that she had to understand completely. Figures and projections were her profession. So why?
   There was only one conceivable answer, and it infuriated him. She thought he might slip back over the edge as he had done in Hong Kong, where she alone had brought him to his senses, to the reality that was uniquely his own, a reality of frightening half truths and only partial remembrances, episodic moments she lived with every day of their lives together. God, how he adored her; he loved her so! And the fact that she had made this foolish, stupid, untenable decision only fueled that love because it was so-so giving, so outrageously unselfish. There were moments in the Far East when he had craved his own death, if only to expunge the guilt he felt at putting her in such dangerous-untenable?-positions. The guilt was still there, always there, but the aging man in him recognized another reality. Their children. The cancer of the Jackal had to be ripped out of all their lives. Couldn't she realize that and leave him alone?
   No. For she was not flying to Paris to save his life-she had too much confidence in Jason Bourne for that. She was coming to Paris to save his mind. I'll handle it, Marie. I can and will handle it!
   Bernardine. He could do it. The Deuxième could find her at Orly or De Gaulle. Find her and take her, put her under guard at a hotel and claim no one knew where he was. Jason ran from the Pont de Solferino to the Quai des Tuileries and to the first telephone he could find.
   "Can you do it?" asked Bourne. "She's only got one updated passport and it's American, not Canadian."
   "I can try on my own," answered Bernardine, "but not with any help from the Deuxième. I don't know how much Saint Alex told you, but at the moment my consultant status has been canceled and I think my desk has been thrown out the window."
   "Shit!"
   "Merde to the triple, mon ami. The Quai d'Orsay wants my underwear burned with me in it, and were it not for certain information I possess regarding several members of the Assembly, they would no doubt revive the guillotine."
   "Can you pass around some money at immigration?"
   "It would be better if I acted in my former official capacity on the assumption that the Deuxième does not so swiftly advertise its embarrassments. Her full name, please."
   "Marie Elise St. Jacques Webb-"
   "Ah, yes, I recall now, at least the St. Jacques," broke in Bernardine. "The celebrated Canadian economist. The newspapers were filled with her photograph. La belle mademoiselle."
   "It was exposure she could have done without."
   "I'm certain it was."
   "Did Alex say anything about Mo Panov?"
   "Your doctor friend?"
   "Yes."
   "I'm afraid not."
   "Goddamn it!"
   "If I may suggest, you must think of yourself now."
   "I understand."
   "Will you pick up the car?"
   "Should I?"
   "Frankly, I wouldn't if I were you. It's unlikely, but the invoice might be traced back to me. There's risk, however minor."
   "That's what I thought. I bought a métro map. I'll use the trains. ... When can I call you?"
   "Give me four, perhaps five hours to get back here from the airports. As our saint explained, your wife could be leaving from several different points of embarkation. To get all those passenger manifests will take time."
   "Concentrate on the flights arriving early tomorrow morning. She can't fake a passport, she wouldn't know how to do it."
   "According to Alex, one does not underestimate Marie Elise St. Jacques. He even spoke French. He said she was formidable."
   "She can come at you from the outer limits, I'll tell you that."
   "Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
   "She's an original, let's leave it there."
   "And you?"
   "I'm taking the subway. It's getting dark. I'll call you after midnight."
   "Bonne chance."
   "Merci."
   Bourne left the booth knowing his next move as he limped down the Quai, the bandage around his knee forcing him to assume a damaged leg. There was a métro station by the Tuileries where he would catch a train to Havre-Caumartin and switch to the Regional Express north line past St.-Denis-Basilique to Argenteuil. Argenteuil, a town of the Dark Ages founded by Charlemagne in honor of a nunnery fourteen centuries ago, now fifteen hundred years later a city that housed the message center of a killer as brutal as any man who roamed the bloody fields with a broadsword in Charlemagne's barbaric days, then as now celebrating and sanctifying brutality in the shadows of religiosity.
   Le Coeur du Soldat was not on a street or a boulevard or an avenue. Instead, it was in a dead-end alleyway around the corner and across from a long-since-closed factory whose faded signs indicated a once flourishing metallurgical refining plant in what had to be the ugliest part of the city. Nor was the Soldat listed in the telephone directory; it was found by innocently asking strangers where it was, as the inquirer was to meet une grosse secousse at this undiscoverable pissoir. The more dilapidated the buildings and the filthier the streets, the more cogent were the directions.
   Bourne stood in the dark narrow alley leaning against the aged rough brick of the opposing structure across from the bistro's entrance. Above the thick massive door in square block letters, several missing, was a dull red sign: L C eur d Soldat. As the door was sporadically opened for entering or departing clientele, metallic martial music blared forth into the alley; and the clientele were not candidates for an haute couture cotillion. His appearance was in keeping, thought Jason, as he struck a wooden match against the brick, lighting a thin black cigar as he limped toward the door.
   Except for the language and the deafening music, it might have been a waterfront bar in Sicily's Palermo, reflected Bourne as he made his way to the crowded bar, his squinting eyes roaming, absorbing everything he could observe-briefly confused, wondering when he had been in Palermo, Sicily.
   A heavyset man in a tank shirt got off a stool; Jason slid on top of it. The clawlike hand gripped his shoulder; Bourne slapped his right hand up, grabbing the wrist and twisting it clockwise, pushing the barstool away and rising to his full height. "What's your problem?" he asked calmly in French but loud enough to be heard.
   "That's my seat, pig! I'm just taking a piss!"
   "So maybe when you're finished, I'll take one," said Jason, his gaze boring into the man's eyes, the strength of his grip unmistakable-emphasized by pressing a nerve with his thumb, which had nothing to do with strength.
   "Ah, you're a fucking cripple ... !" cried the man, trying not to wince. "I don't pick on invalids."
   "I'll tell you what," said Bourne, releasing his thumb. "You come back, we'll take turns, and I'll buy you a drink each time you let me get off this bum leg of mine, okay?"
   Looking up at Jason, the heavyset man slowly grinned. "Hey, you're all right."
   "I'm not all right, but I'm certainly not looking for a fight,' either. Shit, you'd hammer me to the floor." Bourne released the muscular Tank Shirt's arm.
   "I'm not so sure of that," said the man, now laughing and holding his wrist. "Sit, sit! I'll take a piss and come back and buy you a drink. You don't look like you're loaded with francs."
   "Well, like they say, appearances are deceiving," replied Jason, sitting down. "I've got different, better clothes and an old friend told me to meet him here but not to wear them. ... I just got back from good money in Africa. You know, training the savages-"
   Cymbals crashed in the metallic, deafening martial music as Tank Shirt's eyes widened. "Africa?" interrupted the stranger. "I knew it! That grip-LPN."
   What remained of the Chameleon's memory data banks expanded into the code. LPN-Legion Patria Nostra. France's Foreign Legion, the mercenaries of the world. It was not what he had in mind, but it would certainly do. "Christ, you too?" he asked, again coarsely but innocently.
   "La Légion étrangère! 'The Legion is our Fatherland'!"
   "This is crazy!"
   "We don't announce ourselves, of course. There's great jealousy, naturally, because we were the best and we were paid for it, but still these are our people. Soldiers!"
   "When did you leave the Legion?" asked Bourne, sensing a cloud that could be troublesome.
   "Ah, nine years ago! They threw me out before my second conscription for overweight. They were right and they probably saved my life. I'm from Belgique, a corporal."
   "I was discharged a month ago, before my first term was over. Wounds during our incursion into Angola and the fact that they figured I was older than my papers said. They don't pay for extended recoveries." How easily the words came.
   "Angola? We did that? What was the Quai d'Orsay thinking about."
   "I don't know. I'm a soldier, I follow orders and don't question those I can't understand."
   "Sit! My kidneys are bursting. I'll be right back. Maybe we know friends. ... I never heard of any Angola operation."
   Jason leaned forward over the bulging bar and ordered une bière, grateful that the bartender was too busy and the music too loud for the man to have overheard the conversation. However, he was infinitely more grateful to Saint Alex of Conklin, whose primary advice to a field agent was to "get in bad with a mark first before you get in good," the theory being that the reversal from hostility to amiability was far stronger for the change. Bourne swallowed the beer in relief. He had made a friend at Le Coeur du Soldat. It was an inroad, minor but vital, and perhaps not so minor.
   Tank Shirt returned, his thick arm around the shoulders of a younger man in his early twenties, of medium height and with the physique of a large safe; he was wearing an American field jacket. Jason started to get off the barstool. "Sit, sit!" cried his new friend, leaning forward to be heard through the crowds and the music. "I brought us a virgin."
   "What?"
   "You forgot so quickly? He's on his way to becoming a Legion recruit."
   "Oh, that," laughed Bourne, covering his gaffe. "I wondered in a place like this-"
   "In a place like this," broke in Tank Shirt, "half will take it or give it either way as long as it's rough. But that's neither here nor there. I thought he should talk to you. He's American and his French is grotesque, but if you speak slow, he'll catch on.
   "No need to," said Jason in faintly accented English. "I grew up in Neufchâtel, but I spent several years in the States."
   "That's nice to heah." The American's speech was distinctly Deep South, his smile genuine, his eyes wary but unafraid.
   "Then let us start again," said the Belgian in heavily accented English. "My name is ... Maurice, it's as good a name as any. My young friend here is Ralph, at least he says it is. What's yours, my wounded hero?"
   "Francois," replied Jason, thinking of Bernardine and wondering briefly how he was doing at the airports. "And I'm no hero; they died too quickly. ... Order your drinks, I'm paying." They did and Bourne did, his mind racing, trying to recall the little he knew about the French Foreign Legion. "A lot has changed in nine years, Maurice." How very easily the words came, thought the Chameleon. "Why are you enlisting, Ralph?"
   "Ah figure it's the wisest thing I can do-kinda disappear for a few years, and I understand five is the minimum."
   "If you last the first, mon ami," interjected the Belgian.
   "Maurice is right. Listen to him. The officers are tough and difficult-"
   "All French!" added the Belgian. "Ninety percent, at least. Only one foreigner in perhaps three hundred reach the officer corps. Have no illusions."
   "But Ah'm a college man. An engineer."
   "So you'll build fine latrines for the camps and design perfect shit holes in the field," laughed Maurice. "Tell him, François. Explain how the savants are treated."
   "The educated ones must first know how to fight," said Jason, hoping he was right.
   "Always first!" exclaimed the Belgian. "For their schooling is suspicious. Will they doubt? Will they think when they are paid only to follow orders? ... Oh, no, mon ami, I would not emphasize your érudition."
   "Let it come out gradually," added Bourne. "When they need it, not when you want to offer it."
   "Bien!" cried Maurice. "He knows what he's talking about. A true légionnaire!"
   "Can you fight?" asked Jason. "Could you go after someone to kill him?"
   "Ah killed mah feeancee and her two brothers and a cousin, all with a knife and my bare hands. She was fuckin' a big banker in Nashville and they were coverin' for her because he was payin' all of 'em a lot of money. ... Yeah, I can kill, Mr. François."
   Manhunt for Crazed Killer in Nashville
   Young engineer with promising future escapes dragnet. ...
   Bourne remembered the newspaper headlines of only weeks ago, as he stared at the face of the young American. "Go for the Legion," he said.
   "If push comes to shove, Mr. François, could I use you as a reference?"
   "It wouldn't help you, young man, it might only hurt. If you're pressed, just tell the truth. It's your credentials."
   "Aussi bien! He knows the Legion. They will not take maniacs if they can help it, but they-how do you say it, François?"
   "Look the other way, I think."
   "Oui. They look the other way when there are-encore, Francois?"
   "When there are extenuating circumstances."
   "See? My friend Francois also has brains. I wonder how he survived."
   "By not showing them, Maurice."
   A waiter wearing about the filthiest apron Jason had ever seen clapped the Belgian on the neck. "Votre table, René."
   "So?" shrugged Tank Shirt. "Just another name. Quelle différence? We eat and with good fortune we will not be poisoned."
   Two hours later, with four bottles of rough vin ordinaire consumed by Maurice and Ralph, along with suspicious fish, Le Coeur du Soldat settled in for its nightly endurance ritual. Fights occurred episodically, broken up by muscular waiters. The blaring music marshaled memories of battles won and lost, engendering arguments between old soldiers who had basically been the assault troops, cannon fodder, at once resentful and filled with the pride of survival because they had survived the blood and horror their gold-braided superiors knew nothing about. It was the collective roar of the underprivileged foot soldiers heard from the time of the Pharaoh's legions to the grunts of Korea and Vietnam. The properly uniformed officers decreed from far behind the lines, and the foot soldiers died to preserve their superiors' wisdom. Bourne remembered Saigon and could not fault the existence of Le Coeur du Soldat.
   The head bartender, a massive bald man with steel-rimmed glasses, picked up a telephone concealed below the far end of the bar and brought it to his ear. Jason watched him between the roving figures. The man's eyes spun around the crowded room-what he heard appeared to be important; what he saw, dismissible. He spoke briefly, plunged his hand below the bar and kept it there for several moments; he had dialed. Again, he spoke quickly, then calmly replaced the phone out of sight. It was the kind of sequence described by old Fontaine on Tranquility Isle. Message received, message relayed. And at the end of that receiving line was the Jackal.
   It was all he wanted to see that evening; there were things to consider, perhaps men to hire, as he had hired men in the past. Expendable men who meant nothing to him, people who could be paid or bribed, blackmailed or threatened into doing what he wanted them to do without explanation.
   "I just spotted the man I was to meet here," he said to the barely conscious Maurice and Ralph. "He wants me to go outside."
   "You're leaving us?" whined the Belgian.
   "Hey, man, you shouldn't do thay-at," added the young American from the South.
   "Only for tonight." Bourne leaned over the table. "I'm working with another légionnaire, someone who's on to something that involves a lot of money. I don't know you, but you seem like decent men." Bourne pulled out his roll of bills and peeled off a thousand francs, five hundred for each of his companions. "Take this, both of you-shove it in your pockets, quickly!"
   "Holy shee-itt!"
   "Merde!"
   "It's no guarantee, but maybe we can use you. Keep your mouths shut and get out of here ten or fifteen minutes after I leave. Also, no more wine. I want you sober tomorrow. ... When does this place open, Maurice?"
   "I'm not sure it closes. I myself have been here at eight o'clock in the morning. Naturally, it is not so crowded-"
   "Be here around noon. But with clear heads, all right?"
   "I shall be le caporal extraordinaire of La Légion. The man that I once was! Should I wear my uniform?" Maurice belched.
   "Hell, no."
   "Ah'll wear a suit and a tie. I got a suit and a tie, honest!" The American hiccupped.
   "No. Both of you be like you are now, but with your heads straight. Do you understand me?"
   "You sound Très américain, mon ami."
   "He sure do."
   "I'm not, but then the truth's not a commodity here, is it?"
   "Ah know what he means. I learned it real well. You kinda fib with a tie on."
   "No tie, Ralph. See you tomorrow." Bourne slid out of the booth, and suddenly a thought struck him. Instead of heading for the door, he cautiously made his way to the far end of the bar and the huge bald bartender. No seats were available, so, again cautiously, politely, he squeezed sideways between two customers, ordered a Pemod and asked for a napkin on which to write a message, ostensibly personal, to no one who might concern the establishment. On the back of the napkin's crude coat of arms, he wrote the following with his ballpoint pen in French:
   The nest of a blackbird is worth a million francs. Object: confidential business advice. If interested, be at the old factory around the corner in thirty minutes. Where is the harm? An additional 5000 F for being there alone.
   Bourne palmed the napkin along with a hundred-franc note and signaled the bartender, who adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses as if the unknown patron's gesture were an impertinence. Slowly he moved his large body forward, and leaned his thick tattooed arms on the bar. "What is it?" he asked gruffly.
   "I have written out a message for you," replied the Chameleon, his eyes steady, focused on the bartender's glasses. "I am by myself and hope you will consider the request. I am a man who carries wounds but I am not a poor man." Bourne quickly but gently-very gently-reached for the bartender's hand, passing the napkin and the franc note. With a final imploring look at the astonished man, Jason turned and headed for the door, his limp pronounced.
   Outside, Bourne hurried up the cracked pavement toward the alley's entrance. He judged that his interlude at the bar had taken between eight and twelve minutes. Knowing the bartender was watching him, he had purposely not tried to see if his two companions were still at the table, but he assumed they were. Tank Shirt and Field Jacket were not at their sharpest, and in their condition minutes did not count; he could only hope five hundred francs apiece might bring about a degree of responsibility and that they would leave soon as instructed. Oddly enough, he had more faith in Maurice-René than in the young American who called himself Ralph. A former corporal in the Foreign Legion was imbued with an automatic reflex where orders were concerned; he followed them blind drunk or blind sober. Jason hoped so; it was not mandatory, but he could use their assistance-if, if, the bartender at Le Coeur du Soldat had been sufficiently intrigued by the excessive sums of money, as well as by a solitary conversation with a cripple he could obviously kill with one tattooed arm.
   Bourne waited in the street, the wash of the streetlights diminishing in the alley, fewer and fewer people going in or coming out, those arriving in better shape than those departing, all passing Jason without a glance at the derelict weaving against the brick.
   Instinct prevailed. Tank Shirt pulled the much younger Field Jacket through the heavy door, and at one point after the door had swung shut, slapped the American across the face, telling him in unclear words to follow orders, for they were rich and could become much richer.
   "It is better than being shot in Angola!" cried the former légionnaire, loud enough for Bourne to hear. "Why did they do that?"
   Jason stopped them at the entrance to the alley, pulling both men around the edge of the brick building. "It's me," he said, his voice commanding.
   "Sacrebleu ... !"
   "What the Gawdamn hell ... !"
   "Be quiet! You can make another five hundred francs tonight, if you want to. If not, there are twenty other men who will."
   "We are comrades!" protested Maurice-René.
   "And Ah could bust your ass for scarin' us like thay-at. ... But mah buddy's right, we're comrades-that ain't Commie stuff, is it, Maurice?"
   "Taisez-vous!"
   "That means shut up," explained Bourne.
   "Ah know thay-at. I hear it a lot-"
   "Listen to me. Within the next few minutes the bartender in there may come out looking for me. He may, he also may not, I simply don't know. He's the large bald man wearing glasses. Do either of you know him?"
   The American shrugged, but the Belgian nodded his floating head, his lips flat until he spoke. "His name is Santos and he is espagnol."
   "Spanish?"
   "Or latino-américain. No one knows."
   Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, thought Jason. Carlos the Jackal, Venezuelan by birth, rejected terrorist, whom even the Soviets could not handle. Of course he would return to his own. "How well do you know him?"
   It was the Belgian's turn to shrug. "He is the complete authority where Le Coeur du Soldat is concerned. He has been known to crush men's heads if they behave too badly. He always takes off his glasses first, and that is the first sign that something will happen that even proven soldiers do not care to witness. ... If he is coming out here to see you, I would advise you to leave."
   "He may come because he wants to see me, not because he wants to harm me."
   "That is not Santos-"
   "You don't have to know the particulars, they don't concern you. But if he does come out that door, I want you to engage him in conversation, can you do that?"
   "Mais certainement. On several occasions I have slept on his couch upstairs, personally carried there by Santos himself when the cleaning women came in."
   "Upstairs?"
   "He lives above the café on the second floor. It is said that he never leaves, never goes into the streets, even to the markets. Other people purchase all the supplies, or they are simply delivered."
   "I see." Jason pulled out his money and distributed another five hundred francs to each weaving man. "Go back into the alley, and if Santos comes out, stop him and behave like you've had too much to drink. Ask him for money, a bottle, whatever."
   Like children, Maurice-René and Ralph clutched the franc notes, glancing at each other both as conspirators and as victors. François, the crazy légionnaire, was passing out money as if he printed it himself! Their collective enthusiasm grew.
   "How long do you want us to hassle this turkey?" asked the American from the Deep South.
   "I will talk the ears off his bald head!" added the Belgian. "No, just long enough for me to see that he's alone," said Bourne, "that no one else is with him or comes out after him."
   "Piece a' cake, man."
   "We shall earn not only your francs but your respect. You have the word of a Légion corporal!"
   "I'm touched. Now, get back in there." The two inebriated men lurched down the alley, Field Jacket slapping Tank Shirt triumphantly across the shoulders. Jason pressed his back against the street-side brick inches from the edge of the building and waited. Six minutes passed, and then he heard the words he so desperately wanted to hear.
   "Santos! My great and good friend Santos!"
   "What are you doing here, René?"
   "My young American friend was sick to his stomach but it has gone-he vomited."
   "American ... ?"
   "Let me introduce you, Santos. He's about to become a great soldier."
   "There is a Children's Crusade somewhere?" Bourne peered around the corner as the bald bartender looked at Ralph. "Good luck, baby face. Go find your war in a playground."
   "You talk French awful fast, mistuh, but I caught some of that. You're a big mother, but I can be a mean son of a bitch!"
   The bartender laughed and switched effortlessly to English. "Then you'd better be mean someplace else, baby face. We only permit peaceable gentlemen in Le Coeur du Soldat. ... Now I must go."
   "Santos!" cried Maurice-René. "Lend me ten francs. I left my billfold back at my flat."
   "If you ever had a billfold, you left it back in North Africa. You know my policy. Not a sou for any of you."
   "What money I had went for your lousy fish! It made my friend vomit!"
   "For your next meal, go down to Paris and dine at the Ritz. ... Ah, yes! You did have a meal-but you did not pay for it." Jason pulled quickly back as the bartender snapped his head around and looked up the alley. "Good night, René. You too, baby warrior. I have business."
   Bourne ran down the pavement toward the gates of the old factory. Santos was coming to meet him. Alone. Crossing the street into the shadows of the shut-down refinery, he stood still, moving only his hand so as to feel the hard steel and the security of his automatic. With every step Santos took the Jackal was closer! Moments later, the immense figure emerged from the alley, crossed the dimly lit street and approached the rusted gates.
   "I am here, monsieur," said Santos.
   "And I am grateful."
   "I'd rather you'd keep your word first. I believe you mentioned five thousand francs in your note."
   "It's here." Jason reached into his pocket, removed the money, and held it out for the manager of Le Coeur du Soldat.
   "Thank you," said Santos, walking forward and accepting the bills. "Take him!" he added.
   Suddenly, from behind Bourne, the old gates of the factory burst open. Two men rushed out, and before Jason could reach his weapon, a heavy blunt instrument crashed down on his skull.

"We're alone," said the voice across the dark room as Bourne opened his eyes. Santos's huge frame minimized the size of his large armchair, and the low wattage of the single floor lamp heightened the whiteness of his immense bald head. Jason arched his neck and felt the angry swelling on top of his skull; he was angled into the corner of a sofa. "There's no break, no blood, only what I imagine is a very painful lump," commented the Jackal's man.
   "Your diagnosis is accurate, especially the last part."
   "The instrument was hard rubber and cushioned. The results are predictable except where concussions are concerned. At your side, on a tray, is an ice bag. It might be well to use it."
   Bourne reached down in the dim light, grabbed the bulky cold bag and brought it to his head. "You're very considerate," he said flatly.
   "Why not? We have several things to discuss ... perhaps a million, if broken down into francs."
   "It's yours under the conditions stated."
   "Who are you?" asked Santos sharply.
   "That's not one of the conditions."
   "You're not a young man."
   "Not that it matters, but neither are you."
   "You carried a gun and a knife. The latter is for younger men."
   "Who said so?"
   "Our reflexes. ... What do you know about a blackbird?"
   "You might as well ask me how I knew about Le Coeur du Soldat."
   "How did you?"
   "Someone told me."
   "Who?"
   "Sorry, not one of the conditions. I'm a broker and that's the way I work. My clients expect it."
   "Do they also expect you to bind your knee so as to feign an injury? As your eyes opened I pressed the area; there was no sign of pain, no sprain, no break. Also, you carry no identification but considerable amounts of money?"
   "I don't explain my methods, I only clarify my restrictions as I understand them to be. I got my message through to you, didn't I? Since I had no telephone number, I doubt I could have done so very successfully had I arrived at your establishment in a business suit carrying an attaché case."
   Santos laughed. "You never would have gotten inside. You would have been rudely stopped in the alley and stripped."
   "The thought occurred to me. ... Do we do business, say a million francs' worth?"
   The Jackal's man shrugged. "It would seem to me that if a buyer mentions such an amount in his first offer, he will go higher. Say a million and a half. Perhaps even two."
   "But I'm not the buyer, I'm the broker. I was authorized to pay one million, which is far too much in my opinion, but time is of the essence. Take it or leave it, I have other options."
   "Do you really?"
   "Certainly."
   "Not if you're a corpse found floating in the Seine without any identification."
   "I see." Jason looked around the darkened flat; it bore little relationship to the shabby café below. The furniture was large, as required by the oversized owner, but tastefully selected, not elegant but certainly not cheap. What was mildly astonishing were the bookshelves covering the wall between the two front windows. The academic in Bourne wished he could read the titles; they might give him a clearer picture of this strange, huge man whose speech might have been formed at the Sorbonne-a committed brute on the outside, perhaps someone else inside. His eyes returned to Santos. "Then my leaving here freely under my own power is not a given, is it?"
   "No," answered the Jackal's conduit. "It might have been had you answered my simple questions, but you tell me that your conditions, or should I say your restrictions, forbid you to do so. ... Well, I, too, have conditions and you will live or die by them."
   "That's succinct."
   "There's no reason not to be."
   "Of course, you're forfeiting any chance of collecting a million francs-or, as you suggested, perhaps a great deal more."
   "Then may I also suggest," said Santos, crossing his thick arms in front of him and absently glancing at the large tattoos on his skin, "that a man with such funds available will not only part with them in exchange for his life, but will happily deliver the information requested so as to avoid unnecessary and excruciating pain." The Jackal's man suddenly slammed his clenched right fist down on the armrest and shouted, "What do you know about a blackbird? Who told you about Le Coeur du Soldat? Where do you come from and who are you and who is your client?"
   Bourne froze, his body rigid but his mind spinning, whirling, racing. He had to get out! He had to reach Bernardine-how many hours was his call overdue? Where was Marie? Yet what he wanted to do, had to do, could not be done by opposing the giant across the room. Santos was neither a liar nor a fool. He would and could kill his prisoner handily and without hesitation ... and he would not be duped by outright false or convoluted information. The Jackal's man was protecting two turfs-his own and his mentor's. The Chameleon had only one option open: to expose a part of the truth so dangerous as to be credible, the ring of authenticity so plausible that the risk of rejecting it was unacceptable. Jason put the ice bag on the tray and spoke slowly from the shadows of the large couch.
   "Obviously I don't care to die for a client or be tortured to protect his information, so I'll tell you what I know, which isn't as much as I'd like under the present circumstances. I'll take your points in order if I'm not too damned frightened to forget the sequence. To begin with, the funds are not available to me personally. I meet with a man in London to whom I deliver the information, and he releases an account in Bern, Switzerland, to a name and a number-any name, any number-that I give him. ... We'll skip over my life and the 'excruciating pain'-I've answered both. Let's see, what do I know about a blackbird? The Coeur du Soldat is part of that question, incidentally. ... I was told that an old man-name and nationality unknown, at least to me, but I suspect French-approached a well-known public figure and told him he was the target of an assassination. Who believes a drunken old man, especially one with a long police record looking for a reward? Unfortunately the assassination took place, but fortunately an aide to the deceased was by his side when the old man warned him. Even more fortunate, the aide was and is extremely close to my client and the assassination was a welcome event to both. The aide secretly passed on the old man's information. A blackbird is sent a message through a café known as Le Coeur du Soldat in Argenteuil. This blackbird must be an extraordinary man, and now my client wants to reach him. ... As for myself, my offices are hotel rooms in various cities. I'm currently registered under the name of Simon at the Pont-Royal, where I keep my passport and other papers." Bourne paused, his palms outstretched. "I've just told you the entire truth as I know it."
   "Not the entire truth," corrected Santos, his voice low and guttural. "Who is your client?"
   "I'll be killed if I tell you."
   "I'll kill you right now if you don't," said the Jackal's conduit, removing Jason's hunting knife from his wide leather belt, the blade glistening in the light of the floor lamp.
   "Why not give me the information my client wants along with a name and a number-any name, any number-and I'll guarantee you two million francs. All my client asks is for me to be the only intermediary. Where's the harm? The blackbird can turn me down and tell me to go to hell. ... Three million!"
   Santos's eyes wavered as if the temptation were almost too much for his imagination. "Perhaps we'll do business later-"
   "Now."
   "No!" Carlos's man pushed his immense body out of the chair and walked toward the couch, the knife held threateningly in front of him. "Your client."
   "Plural," replied Bourne. "A group of powerful men in the United States."
   "Who?"
   "They guard their names like nuclear secrets, but I know of one and he should be enough for you."
   "Who?"
   "Find out for yourself-at least learn the enormity of what I'm trying to tell you. Protect your blackbird by all means! Ascertain that I'm telling you the truth and in the process make yourself so rich you can do anything you want to do for the rest of your life. You could travel, disappear, perhaps have time for those books of yours rather than being concerned with all that garbage downstairs. As you pointed out, neither of us is young. I make a generous brokering fee and you're a wealthy man, free of care, of unpleasant drudgery. ... Again, where's the harm? I can be turned down, my clients turned down. There's no trap. My clients don't ever want to see him. They want to hire him."
   "How could this be done? How could I be satisfied?"
   "Invent some high position for yourself and reach the American ambassador in London-the name is Atkinson. Tell him you've received confidential instructions from Snake Lady. Ask him if you should carry them out."
   "Snake Lady? What's that?"
   "Medusa. They call themselves Medusa."
   Mo Panov excused himself and slid out of the booth. He made his way through the crowded highway diner toward the men's room, frantically scanning the wall at the far end for a pay phone. There was none! The only goddamned phone was ten feet from the booth and in clear sight of the wild-eyed platinum blonde whose paranoia was as deeply embedded as the dark roots of her hair. He had casually mentioned that he thought he should call his office and tell his staff about the accident and where he was, and was instantly met with invective.
   "And have a swarm of cops coming out to pick you up! Not on your fuckin' life, Medicine Man. Your office calls the fuzz, they call my devoted Chief Fork-in-Mouth, and my ass is bouncing into every barbed-wire fence in the county. He's in with every cop on the roads. I think he tells 'em where to get laid."
   "There'd be no reason for me to mention you and I certainly wouldn't. If you recall, you said he might resent me."
   "Resent don't count. He'd just cut your cute little nose off. I'm not takin' any chances-you don't look like you're too with-it. You'd blurt out about your accident-next thing the cops."
   "You know, you're not really making sense."
   "All right, I'll make sense. I'll yell 'Rape!' and tell these not-so-pansy truckers I picked you up on the road two days ago and I've been a sex slave ever since. How does that grab you?"
   "Very firmly. May I at least go to the men's room? It's urgent that I do."
   "Be my guest. They don't put phones in the can in these places."
   "Really? ... No, honestly, I'm not chagrined, not disappointed-just curious. Why don't they? Truckers make good money; they're not interested in stealing dimes or quarters."
   "Boy, you're from La La Land, Doc. Things happen on the highways; things get switched or snitched, you dig? If people make phone calls, other people want to know who makes them."
   "Really ... ?"
   "Oh, Jesus. Hurry up. We only got time for a couple of greasies, so I'll order. He'll head up Seventy, not Ninety-seven. He wouldn't figure."
   "Figure what? What are Seventy and Ninety-seven?"
   "Routes, for Christ's sake! There are routes and there are routes. You are one dumb medicine man. Hit the head, then maybe later we'll stop at a motel where we can continue our business discussion while you get an advance bonus."
   "I beg your pardon?"
   "I'm pro-choice. Is that against your religion?"
   "Good Lord, no. I'm a firm advocate."
   "Good. Hurry up!"
   So Panov headed for the men's room, and indeed the woman was right. There was no phone, and the window to the outside was too small for anyone but a small cat or a large rat to crawl through. ... But he had money, a great deal of money, along with five driver's licenses from five different states. In Jason Bourne's lexicon these were weapons, especially the money. Mo went to the urinal-long overdue-and then to the door; he pulled it back several inches to observe the blonde. Suddenly, the door swung violently back several feet and Panov crashed into the wall.
   "Hey, sorry, pal!" cried a short heavyset man, who grabbed the psychiatrist by the shoulders as Mo grabbed his face. "You okay, buddy?"
   "Oh, certainly. Yes, of course."
   "The hell you are, you got a nosebleed! C'mon over here by the towels," ordered the T-shirted trucker, one sleeve rolled up to hold a pack of cigarettes. "C'mon, put your head back while I get some cold water on your schnoz. ... Loosen up and lean against the wall. There, that's better; we'll stop this sucker in a moment or two." The short man reached up and gently pressed the wet paper towels across Panov's face while holding the back of his neck, and every few seconds checking the flow of blood from Mo's nostrils. "There y'are, buddy, it's damned near stopped. Just breathe through your mouth, deep breaths, you got me? Head tilted, okay?"
   "Thank you," said Panov, holding the towels and amazed that a nosebleed could be stopped so quickly. "Thank you very much."
   "Don't thank me, I bashed you one by mistake," answered the trucker, relieving himself. "Feel better now?" he asked, zipping up his trousers.
   "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 European, 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 beer on bizziness or playseeoor, madame?"
   "Je parle 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 particular 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?"
   "Santos wants to see you. With peace in his heart."

24
   The Emergency Medical Service helicopter was lowered into its threshold; the rotors were cut and the blades thumped to a stop. Following EMS procedure when disembarking ambulatory patients, only then did the exit door open and the metal steps slap down to the ground. A uniformed paramedic preceded Panov, turning and assisting the doctor to the tarmac, where a second man in civilian clothes escorted him to a waiting limousine. Inside were Peter Holland, director of the CIA, and Alex Conklin, the latter in the right jump seat, obviously for conversational purposes. The psychiatrist climbed in beside Holland; he took several deep breaths, sighed audibly and fell back into the seat.
   "I am a maniac," he stated, emphasizing each word. "Certifiably insane and I'll sign the papers of commitment myself."
   "You're safe, that's all that matters, Doctor," said Holland. "Good to see you, Crazy Mo," added Conklin.
   "Have you any idea what I did? ... I purposely crashed a car into a tree with me in it! Then after walking at least half the distance to the Bronx, I was picked up by the only person I know who may have more loose bananas in her head than I do. Her libido is unhinged and she's running away from her trucker husband-hot on her French heels-who I subsequently learned has the cuddly name of the Bronk. My hooker chauffeur proceeds to hold me hostage with such wiles as threatening to yell 'Rape!' in a diner filled with a collection of the NFL's most carnivorous linebackers-except for one who got me out." Panov abruptly stopped and reached into his pocket. "Here," he continued, thrusting the five driver's licenses and the roughly six thousand dollars into Conklin's hands.
   "What's this?" asked the bewildered Alex.
   "I robbed a bank and decided to become a professional driver! ... What do you think it is? I took it from the man who was guarding me. I described as best I could to the chopper's crew where the crash took place. They're flying back to find him. They will; he's not walking anywhere."
   Peter Holland reached for the limousine's telephone, pushing three buttons. In less than two seconds, he spoke. "Get word to EMS-Arlington, Equipment Fifty-seven. The man they're picking up is to be brought directly to Langley. To the infirmary. And keep me informed as to their progress. ... Sorry, Doctor. Go on."
   "Go on? What's to go on to? I was kidnapped and held in some farmhouse and injected with enough sodium pentothal, if I'm not mistaken, to make me a resident of-of La La Land, which I was recently accused of being by Madame Scylla Charybdis."
   "What the hell are you talking about?" said Holland flatly. "Nothing, Admiral, or Mr. Director or-"
   "Peter's fine, Mo," completed Holland. "I simply didn't understand you."
   "There's nothing to understand but the facts. My allusions are compulsive attempts at false erudition. It's called posttraumatic stress."
   "Of course, now you're perfectly clear."
   Panov turned to the DCI with a nervous smile. "It's my turn to be sorry, Peter. I'm still wound up. This last day or so hasn't exactly been representative of my normal life-style."
   "I don't think it's anybody's," concurred Holland. "I've seen my share of rotten stuff, but nothing like this, nothing that tampers with the mind. I missed all that."
   "There's no hurry, Mo," added Conklin. "Don't press yourself; you've taken a lot of punishment. If you like, we can postpone the briefing for a few hours so you can rest, calm down."
   "Don't be a damn fool, Alex!" protested the psychiatrist sharply. "For the second time I've put David's life in jeopardy. The knowledge of that is far worse punishment. There's not a minute to lose. ... Forget Langley, Peter. Take me to one of your clinics. Free-floating, I want to get out everything I can recall, consciously or unconsciously. Hurry. I'll tell the doctors what to do."
   "You've got to be joking," said Holland, staring at Panov.
   "I'm not joking for an instant. You both have to know what I know-whether I realize I know it or not. Can't you understand that?"
   The director again reached for the telephone and pressed a single button. In the front seat, beyond the glass partition, the driver picked up the phone recessed in the seat beside him. "There's been a change of plans," said Holland. "Head for Sterile Five."
   The limousine slowed down, and at the next intersection turned right toward the rolling hills and verdant fields of the Virginia hunt country. Morris Panov closed his eyes, as if in a trance or as a man might do facing some appalling ordeal-his own execution perhaps. Alex looked at Peter Holland; they both glanced at Mo, then back at each other. Whatever Panov was doing, there was a reason for it. Until they reached the gates of the estate that was Sterile House Five thirty minutes later, no one spoke.
   "DCI and company," announced the driver to the guard wearing the uniform of a private security firm, in reality a CIA proprietary. The limousine proceeded down the long tree-lined entrance.
   "Thanks," said Mo, opening his eyes and blinking. "As I'm sure you gathered, I'm trying to clear my head and with any luck bring down my blood pressure."
   "You don't have to do this," insisted Holland.
   "Yes, I do," said Panov. "Maybe with time I could piece things together with a degree of clarity, but I can't now and we don't have the time." Mo turned to Conklin. "How much can you tell me?"
   "Peter knows everything. For the sake of that blood pressure of yours, I won't fill you in on all the details, but the bottom line is that David's all right. At least we haven't heard otherwise."
   "Marie? The children?"
   "On the island," replied Alex, avoiding Holland's eyes.
   "What about this Sterile Five?" asked Panov, now looking at Holland. "I assume there's a specialist, or specialists, the kind I need."
   "In relays and around the clock. You probably know a few of them."
   "I'd rather not." The long dark vehicle swung around the circular drive and stopped in front of the stone steps of the pillared Georgian mansion that was the focal point of the estate. "Let's go," said Mo quietly, stepping outside.
   The sculptured white doors, the rose-colored marble floors and the elegant winding staircase in the great hall all combined to furnish a superb cover for the work done at Sterile Five. Defectors, double and triple agents, and field officers returned from complex assignments for rest and debriefing were continuously processed through its various agendas. The staff, each with a Four Zero clearance, consisted of two doctors and three nurses in relay units, cooks and domestic attendants recruited from the foreign service-in the main, overseas embassies-and guards, all with Ranger training or its equivalent. They moved about the house and grounds unobtrusively, eyes constantly alert, each with either a concealed or an unconcealed weapon, except for the medical personnel. Visitors without exception were given small lapel pins by the well-spoken, dark-suited house steward, who admitted them and directed them to the locations of their scheduled appointments. The man was a retired gray-haired interpreter for the Central Intelligence Agency, but he suited his position so well in appearance he might have come from Central Casting.
   Naturally, at the sight of Peter Holland, the steward was astonished. He prided himself on committing to memory every schedule at Sterile Five. "A surprise visit, sir?"
   "Good to see you, Frank." The DCI shook hands with the former interpreter. "You may remember Alex Conklin-"
   "Good Lord, is that you, Alex? It's been years!" Again hands were shaken. "When was the last time? ... That crazy woman from Warsaw, wasn't it?"
   "The KGB's been chuckling ever since," laughed Conklin. "The only secret she had was the recipe for the worst golumpki I've ever tasted. ... Still keeping your hand in, Frank?"
   "Every now and then," replied the steward, grimacing in mock disapproval. "These young translators don't know a quiche from a kluski."
   "Since I don't either," said Holland, "may I have a word with you, Frank?" The two older men walked off to the side speaking quietly as Alex and Mo Panov held their places, the latter frowning and sporadically breathing deeply. The director returned, handing lapel pins to his colleagues. "I know where to go now," he said. "Frank will call ahead."
   The three of them walked up the curving ornate staircase, Conklin limping, and down a lushly carpeted hallway on the left to the rear of the enormous house. On the right wall was a door unlike any of the doors they had passed; it was made of thick varnished oak with four small windows in the upper recessed panels and two black buttons set in an outlet casing beside the knob. Holland inserted a key, twisted it and pressed the lower button; instantly a red light appeared in the small stationary camera mounted on the ceiling. Twenty seconds later there was the familiar muffled metallic clanking of an elevator coming to a stop. "Inside, gentlemen," ordered the DCI. The door closed and the elevator began its descent.
   "We walked up to go down?" asked Conklin.
   "Security," answered the director. "It's the only way to get where we're going. There's no elevator on the first floor."
   "Why not, may the man with one foot missing ask?" said Alex.
   "I'd think you'd be able to answer that better than me," retorted the DCI. "Apparently all accesses to the cellars are sealed off except for two elevators that bypass the first floor and for which you need a key. This one and another on the other side; this takes us to where we want to go, the other leads to the furnaces, air-conditioning units and all the rest of the normal basement equipment. Frank gave me the key, incidentally. If it doesn't return to its slot within a given period of time, another alarm goes off."
   "It all strikes me as unnecessarily complicated," said Panov curtly, nervously. "Expensive games."
   "Not necessarily, Mo," interrupted Conklin gently. "Explosives can be concealed pretty easily in heating pipes and ducts. And did you know that during the last days of Hitler's bunker a few of his saner aides tried to insert poison gas into the air-filtering machinery? These are just precautions."
   The elevator stopped and the door opened. "To your left, Doctor," Holland said. The hallway was a glistening pristine white, antiseptic in its way, which was altogether proper, as this underground complex was a highly sophisticated medical center. It was devoted not only to the healing of men and women, but also to the process of breaking them down, crippling their resistance so that information might be revealed, truths learned that could prevent the penetration of high-risk operations, frequently saving lives as a result.
   They entered a room that was in stark contrast to the antiseptic quality of the fluorescent-lit hallway. There were heavy armchairs and soft indirect lighting, a coffee urn on a table with cups and saucers; newspapers and magazines were folded neatly on other tables, all the comforts of a lounge designed for those waiting for someone or something. From an inner door a man in a white medical jacket appeared; he was frowning, looking uncertain.
   "Director Holland?" he said, approaching Peter, extending his hand. "I'm Dr. Walsh, second shift. Needless to say, we didn't expect you."
   "I'm afraid it's an emergency and hardly one of my choosing. May I introduce you to Dr. Morris Panov-unless you know him?"
   "Of him, of course." Walsh again extended his hand. "A pleasure, Doctor, also a privilege."
   "You may take both back before we're finished, Doctor. May we talk privately?"
   "Certainly. My office is inside." The two men disappeared through the inner door.
   "Shouldn't you go with them?" asked Conklin, looking at Peter.
   "Why not you?"
   "Goddamn it, you're the director. You should insist!"
   "You're his closest friend. So should you."
   "I don't have any clout here."
   "Mine disappeared when Mo dismissed us. Come on, let's have some coffee. This place gives me the proverbial creeps." Holland went to the table with the coffee urn and poured two cups. "How do you like it?"
   "With more milk and sugar than I'm supposed to have. I'll do it."
   "I still take it black," said the director, moving away from the table and removing a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "My wife says the acid will kill me one day."
   "Other people say tobacco will."
   "What?"
   "Look." Alex pointed at the sign on the opposite wall. It read: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.
   "That I've got enough clout for," announced Holland quietly as he snapped his lighter and lit a cigarette.
   Nearly twenty minutes passed. Every now and then one or the other of them picked up a magazine or a newspaper only to put it down moments later and look up at the inner door. Finally, twenty-eight minutes after he had disappeared with Panov, the doctor named Walsh reappeared.
   "He tells me you know what he's requesting and that you have no objections, Director Holland."
   "I've got plenty of objections, but it seems he's overruled them. ... Oh, excuse me, Doctor, this is Alex Conklin. He's one of us and a close friend of Panov."
   "How do you feel, Mr. Conklin?" asked Walsh, nodding at Alex as he returned the greeting.
   "I hate what he's doing-what he wants to do-but he says it makes sense. If it does, it's right for him and I understand why he insists on doing it. If it doesn't make sense, I'll pull him out of there myself, one foot and all. Does it make sense, Doctor? And what's the risk of damage?"
   "There's always a risk where drugs are concerned, especially in terms of chemical balance, and he knows that. It's why he's designed an intravenous flow that prolongs his own psychological pain but somewhat reduces the potential damage."
   "Somewhat?" cried Alex.
   "I'm being honest. So is he."
   "Bottom line, Doctor," said Holland.
   "If things go wrong, two or three months of therapy, not permanent."
   "And the sense?" insisted Conklin. "Does it make sense?"
   "Yes," replied Walsh. "What happened to him is not only recent, it's consumed him. It's obsessed his conscious, which can only mean that it's inflamed his subconscious. He's right. His unreachable recall is on the cutting edge. ... I came in here as a courtesy. He's insisted we proceed, and from what he's told me, I'd do the same thing. Each of us would."
   "What's the security?" asked Alex.
   "The nurse will be dismissed and stay outside the door. There'll be only a single battery-operated tape recorder and me ... and one or both of you." The doctor turned to the door, then glanced back. "I'll send for you at the proper time," he added, again disappearing inside.
   Conklin and Peter Holland looked at each other. The second period of waiting began.
   To their astonishment, it ended barely ten minutes later. A nurse came out into the lounge and asked them to follow her. They walked through what appeared to be a maze of antiseptic white walls broken up only by recessed white panels with glass knobs that denoted doors. Only once on their brief journey did they see another human being; it was a man in a white smock, wearing a white surgical mask, who walked out of yet another white door, his sharp, intense eyes above the white cloth somehow accusing, determining them to be aliens from some different world that had not been cleared for Sterile House Five.
   The nurse opened a door; there was a blinking red light above its top frame. She put her index finger to her lips, indicating silence. Holland and Conklin walked quietly inside a dark room and confronted a drawn white curtain concealing a bed or an examining table beyond, a small circle of intense light shining through the cloth. They heard the softly spoken words of Dr. Walsh.
   "You are going back, Doctor, not far back, just a day or so, just when you began to feel the dull, constant pain in your arm ... your arm, Doctor. Why are they inflicting pain on your arm? You were in a farmhouse, a small farmhouse with fields outside your window, and then they put a blindfold on you and began hurting your arm. Your arm, Doctor."
   Suddenly, there was a muted flashing of green light reflected on the ceiling. The curtain parted electronically several feet, revealing the bed, the patient and the doctor. Walsh took his finger off a bedside button and looked at them, gesturing slowly with his hands as if to say, There's no one else here. Confirmed?
   Both witnesses nodded, at first mesmerized, then repelled at the sight of Panov's grimacing pale face and the tears that began to flow from his wide-open eyes. Then, as one, they saw the white straps that emerged from under the white sheet, holding Mo in place; the order had to be his.
   "The arm, Doctor. We have to begin with the physically invasive procedure, don't we? Because you know what it does, Doctor, don't you? It leads to another invasive procedure that you cannot permit. You must stop its progression."
   The ear-shattering scream was a prolonged shriek of defiance and horror. "No, no! I won't tell you! I killed him once, I won't kill him again! Get away from meeeee ... !"
   Alex slumped, falling to the floor. Peter Holland grabbed him and gently the strong, broad-shouldered admiral, a veteran of the darkest operations in the Far East, led Conklin silently through the door to the nurse. "Get him away from here, please."
   "Yes, sir."
   "Peter," coughed Alex, trying to stand, collapsing on his false foot. "I'm sorry, Christ, I'm sorry!"
   "What for?" whispered Holland.
   "I should watch but I can't watch!"
   "I understand. It's all too close. If I were you, I probably couldn't either."
   "No, you don't understand! Mo said he killed David, but of course he didn't. But I meant to, I really wanted to kill him! I was wrong, but I tried with all the expertise in my bones to kill him! And now I've done it again. I sent him to Paris. ... It's not Mo, it's me!"
   "Put him against the wall, miss. Let him sink to the floor and leave us alone."
   "Yes, sir!" The nurse did as she was ordered and fled, leaving Holland and Alex alone in the antiseptic maze.
   "Now, you listen to me, Field Man," whispered the gray-haired director of the Central Intelligence Agency, kneeling in front of Conklin. "This fucking merry-go-round of guilt had better stop-has got to stop-or nobody's going to be any good to anybody. I don't give a good goddamn what you or Panov did thirteen years ago, or five years ago, or now! We're all reasonably bright people, and we did what each of us did because we thought they were the right moves at the time. ... Guess what, Saint Alex? Yes, I've heard the term. We make mistakes. Fucking inconvenient, isn't it? Maybe we're not so brilliant after all. Maybe Panov isn't the greatest behavioral whatever-the-hell-it-is; maybe you're not the shrewdest son of a bitch in the field, the one who got canonized, and maybe I'm not the superjock behind-the-lines strategist they've made me out to be. So what? We take our baggage and go where we have to go."
   "Oh, for Christ's sake, shut up!" yelled Conklin, struggling against the wall.
   "Shhh!"
   "Oh, shit! The last thing I need is a sermon from you! If I had a foot, I'd take you."
   "Now we're physical?"
   "I was Black Belt. First class, Admiral."
   "Golly, gee. I don't even know how to wrestle."
   Their eyes met and Alex was the first to laugh quietly. "You're too much, Peter. I got your message. Help me up, will you? I'll go back to the lounge and wait for you. Come on, give me a hand."
   "The hell I will," said Holland, getting to his feet and standing over Conklin. "Help yourself. Someone told me that the Saint made it back through a hundred and forty miles in enemy territory, through rivers and streams and jungle, and arrived at the Foxtrot base camp asking if anybody had a bottle of bourbon."
   "Yeah, well, that was different. I was a hell of a lot younger and I had another foot."
   "Pretend you got one now, Saint Alex." Holland winked. "I'm going back inside. One of us has to be there."
   "Bastard!"
   For an hour and forty-seven minutes Conklin sat in the lounge. His attachable footless foot never throbbed, but it was throbbing now. He did not know what the impossible feeling meant, but he could not dismiss the beat that surged through his leg. If nothing else, it was something to think about, and he thought wistfully of the younger days, when he had both feet, and before. Oh, how he had wanted to change the world! And how he had felt so right in a destiny that forced him to become the youngest valedictorian in his high school's history, the youngest freshman ever accepted at Georgetown, a bright, bright light that shimmered at the end of the tunnels of academe. His decline started when someone, somewhere, found out that his name at birth was not Alexander Conklin but Aleksei Nikolae Konsolikov. That now faceless man had casually asked him a question, the answer to which had changed Conklin's life.
   "Do you by any chance speak Russian?"
   "Of course," he had replied, amused that his visitor would even think he might not. "As you obviously know, my parents were immigrants. I grew up not only in a Russian home but in a Russian neighborhood-at least in the early years. You couldn't buy a loaf of bread at the ovoshchnoi otdel if you didn't. And at church school the older priests and nuns, like the Poles, held ferociously on to the language. ... I'm sure it contributed to my leaving the faith."
   "Those were the early years, however, as I believe you mentioned."
   "Yes."
   "What changed?"
   "I'm sure it's in your government report somewhere and will hardly satisfy. your iniquitous Senator McCarthy."
   The face came back to Alex with the memory of those words. It was a middle-aged face and it had suddenly become expressionless, the eyes clouded but with suppressed anger in them. "I assure you, Mr. Conklin, I am in no way associated with the senator. You call him iniquitous, I have other terms, but they're not pertinent here. ... What changed?"
   "Quite late in his life my father became what he had been in Russia, a highly successful merchant, a capitalist. At last count he owned seven supermarkets in upscale malls. They're called Conklin's Corners. He's over eighty now, and although I love him dearly, I regret to say he's an ardent supporter of the senator. I simply consider his years, his struggles, his hatred of the Soviets, and avoid the subject."
   "You're very bright and very diplomatic."
   "Bright and diplomatic," Alex had agreed.
   "I've shopped at a couple of Conklin's Corners. Kind of expensive."
   "Oh, yes."
   "Where did the 'Conklin' come from?"
   "My father. My mother says he saw it on a billboard advertising motor oil, she thinks, about four or five years after they got here. And, of course, the Konsolikov had to go. As my considerably bigoted father once said, 'Only the Jews with Russian names can make money over here.' Again, I avoid the subject."
   "Very diplomatic."
   "It's not difficult. He has his share of good points as well."
   "Even if he didn't, I'm sure you could be convincing in your diplomacy, in the concealment of your feelings."
   "Why do I think that's a leading statement?"
   "Because it is, Mr. Conklin. I represent a government agency that's extremely interested in you, and one in which your future would be as unlimited as that of any potential recruit I've spoken to in a decade. ..."
   That conversation had taken place nearly thirty years ago, mused Alex, his eyes drifting up once again to the inner door of Sterile Five's waiting lounge in its own private medical center. And how crazy the intervening years had been. In a stress-defying bid for unrealistic expansion, his father had overextended himself, committing enormous sums of money that existed only in his imagination and in the minds of avaricious bankers. He lost six of his seven supermarkets, the smallest and last supporting a life-style that he found unacceptable, so he conveniently had a massive stroke and died as Alex's own adult life was about to begin.
   Berlin-East and West. Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent and Kamchatka. Vienna, Paris, Lisbon and Istanbul. Then back across the world to stations in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Cambodia, Laos, and finally Saigon and the tragedy that was Vietnam. Over the years, with his facile mastery of languages and the expertise that came with survival, he had become the Agency's point man in clandestine operations, its primary scout and often the on-scene strategist for covert activities. Then one morning with the mists hanging over the Mekong Delta, a land mine shattered his life as well as his foot. There was little left for a field man who depended on mobility in his chosen work; the rest was downhill and out of the field. His excessive drinking he accepted, and excused as genetic. The Russian's winter of depression carried over into spring, summer and autumn. The skeletal, trembling wreck of a man who was about to go under was given a reprieve. David Webb-Jason Bourne-came back into his life.
   The door opened, mercifully cutting short his reverie, and Peter Holland walked slowly into the lounge. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes glazed, and in his left hand were two small plastic containers, each presumably holding a cassette tape.
   "As long as I live," said Peter, his voice low and hollow, barely above a whisper, "I hope to Christ I never go through anything like this again, never witness anything like this again."
   "How's Mo?"
   "I didn't think he'd live. ... I thought he'd kill himself. Every now and then Walsh would stop. Let me tell you, he was one frightened doctor."
   "Why didn't he call it off, for God's sake?"
   "I asked him that. He said Panov's instructions were not only explicit but that he'd written them out and signed them and expected them to be followed to the letter. Maybe there's some kind of unwritten code of ethics between doctors, I don't know, but I do know Walsh hooked him up to an EKG, which he rarely took his eyes off. Neither did I; it was easier than looking at Mo. Jesus, let's get out of here!"
   "Wait a minute. What about Panov?"
   "He's not ready for a welcome-home party. He'll stay here for a couple of days under observation. Walsh will call me in the morning."
   "I'd like to see him. I want to see him."
   "There's nothing to see but a human dishrag. Believe me, you don't and he wouldn't want you to. Let's go."
   "Where?"
   "Your place in Vienna-our place in Vienna. I assume you've got a cassette machine."
   "I've got everything but a moon rocket, most of which I can't operate."
   "I want to stop and get a bottle of whisky."
   "There's whatever you want at the apartment."
   "It doesn't bother you?" asked Holland, studying Alex.
   "Would it matter if it did?"
   "Not a bit. ... If I remember, there's an extra bedroom, isn't there?"
   "Yes."
   "Good. We may be up most of the night listening to these." The director held up the cassettes. "The first couple of times won't mean anything. All we'll hear is the pain, not the information."
   It was shortly past five o'clock in the afternoon when they left the estate known within the Agency as Sterile House Five. The days were growing shorter, September on the cusp, the descending sun announcing the forthcoming change with an intensity of color that was the death of one season and the birth of another.
   "The light's always brightest before we die," said Conklin, leaning back in the seat beside Holland in the limousine, staring out the window.
   "I find that not only inappropriate but quite possibly sophomoric," declared Peter wearily. "I won't commit to the latter until I know who said it. Who was it?"
   "Jesus, I think."
   "The Scriptures were never edited. Too many campfires, no on-scene confirmation."
   Alex laughed softly, reflectively. "Did you ever actually read them? The Scriptures, I mean."
   "Most of it-most of them."
   "Because you had to?"
   "Hell, no. My father and mother were as agnostic as any two people could be without being branded godless pariahs. They shut up about it and sent me and my two sisters to a Protestant service one week, a Catholic mass on another, and a synagogue after that. Never with any regularity, but I guess they figured we should catch the whole scene. That's what makes kids want to read. Natural curiosity wrapped in mysticism."
   "Irresistible," agreed Conklin. "I lost my faith, and now after years of proclaiming my spiritual independence, I wonder if I'm missing something."
   "Like what?"
   "Comfort, Peter. I have no comfort."
   "For what?"
   "I don't know. Things I can't control, maybe."
   "You mean you don't have the comfort of an excuse, a metaphysical excuse. Sorry, Alex, we part company. We're accountable for what we do, and no confessional absolution can change that."
   Conklin turned his head, his eyes wide open, and looked at Holland. "Thank you," he said.
   "For what?"
   "For sounding like me, even using a variation of the words I've used. ... I came back from Hong Kong five years ago with the banner of Accountability on my lance."
   "You've lost me."
   "Forget it. I'm back on track. ... 'Beware the pitfalls of ecclesiastical presumption and self-absorbed thought."
   "Who the hell said that?"
   "Either Savonarola or Salvador Dali, I can't remember who."
   "Oh, for Christ's sake, cut the crap!" laughed Holland.
   "Why should I? It's the first chuckle we've had. And what about your two sisters? What happened to them?"
   "It's a better joke," replied Peter, his head angled down into his chin, a mischievous smile on his lips. "One's a nun in New Delhi, and the other's president of her own public relations firm in New York and uses better Yiddish than most of her colleagues in the profession. A couple of years ago she told me they stopped calling her shiksa. She loves her life; so does my other sister in India."
   "Yet you chose the military."
   "Not 'yet,' Alex. ... And I chose it. I was an angry young man who really believed this country was being dumped on. I came from a privileged family-money, influence, an expensive prep school-that guaranteed me-me, not the black kid on the streets of Philadelphia or Harlem-automatic admittance to Annapolis. I simply figured I had to somehow earn that privilege. I had to show that people like me didn't just use our advantages to avoid, but instead to extend, our responsibilities."
   "Aristocracy reborn," said Conklin. "Noblesse oblige-nobility imposes obligations."
   "That's not fair," protested Holland.
   "Yes, it is, in a very real sense. In Greek, aristo means the 'best,' and kratia is the word for 'rule.' In ancient Athens such young men led armies, their swords up front, not behind, if only to prove to the troops that they would sacrifice with the lowliest of them, for the lowliest were under their commands, the commands of the finest."
   Peter Holland's head arched back into the top of the velvet seat, his eyes half closed. "Maybe that was part of it, I'm not sure-I'm not sure at all. We were asking so much ... for what? Pork Chop Hill? Unidentifiable, useless terrain in the Mekong? Why? For Christ's sake, why? Men shot, their stomachs and chests blown away by an enemy two feet in front of them, by a 'Cong who knew jungles they didn't know? What kind of war was that? ... If guys like me didn't go up with the kids and say, 'Look, here I am, I'm with you,' how the hell do you think we could have lasted as long as we did? There might have been mass revolts and maybe there should have been. Those kids were what some people call niggers, and spics and the foul-ups who couldn't read or write beyond a third-grade level. The privileged had deferments-deferments from getting soiled-or service that damn near guaranteed no combat. The others didn't. And if my being with them-this privileged son of a bitch-meant anything, it was the best gig I ever did in my life." Holland suddenly stopped talking and shut his eyes.
   "I'm sorry, Peter. I didn't mean to rough up past roads, I really didn't. Actually, I started with my guilt, not yours. ... It's crazy how it all dovetails and feeds upon itself, isn't it? What did you call it? The merry-go-round of guilt. Where does it stop?"
   "Now," said Holland, sitting up in the seat, straightening his back and shoulders. He picked up the limousine telephone, punched two numbers and spoke. "Drop us off in Vienna, please. And when you've done that, go find a Chinese restaurant and bring us back the best they've got. ... Frankly, I'm partial to spare ribs and lemon chicken."
   Holland proved to be half right. The first hearing of Panov's session under the serum was agonizing to listen to, the voice devastating, the emotional content blurring the information, especially for anyone who knew the psychiatrist. The second hearing, however, produced instantaneous concentration, engendered without question by the very pain they heard. There was no time to indulge in personal feelings; the information was suddenly everything. Both men began taking copious notes on legal pads, frequently stopping and replaying numerous sections for clarity and understanding. The third hearing refined the salient points further; by the end of the fourth, both Alex and Peter Holland had thirty to forty pages of notes apiece. They spent an additional hour in silence, each going over his own analysis.
   "Are you ready?" asked the CIA's director from the couch, a pencil in his hand.
   "Sure," said Conklin, seated at the desk with his various electronic equipment, the tape machine at his elbow.
   "Any opening remarks?"
   "Yes," replied Alex. "Ninety-nine point forty-four percent of what we listened to gives us nothing, except to tell us what a terrific prober this Walsh is. He hopscotched around picking up cues faster than I could find them, and I wasn't exactly an amateur when it came to interrogations."
   "Agreed," said Holland. "I wasn't so bad either, especially with a blunt instrument. Walsh is good."
   "Better than that, but that doesn't concern us. What he pulled out of Mo does-again with a 'but.' It's not in Panov's recapturing what he revealed because we have to assume he revealed almost everything I told him. Instead, it's in what he repeated having heard." Conklin separated several pages. "Here's an example. 'The family will be pleased ... our supreme will give us his blessing.' He's repeating someone else's words, not his own. Now, Mo isn't familiar with criminal jargon, certainly not to the point where he would automatically make a connection, but the connection's there. Take the word 'supreme' and change it by removing one vowel and inserting another. 'Supremo'-capo supremo, hardly a heavenly supreme being. Suddenly, 'the family' is light years away from Norman Rockwell, and 'blessing' is interchangeable with a reward or a bonus."
   "Mafia," said Peter, his eyes steady and clear despite a number of drinks that had obviously been burned out of his system. "I hadn't thought that one through, but I marked it instinctively. ... Okay, here's something else along the same lines, the same lines because I also picked up on the unlike-Panov phrases." Holland flipped through his legal pad and stopped at a specific page. "Here. 'New York wants it all.' " Peter continued slapping over the pages. "Again here. 'That Wall Street is something.' " Once more the DCI progressed through his legal pad. "And this one. 'Blondie fruits'-the rest is garbled."
   "I missed that. I heard it, but it didn't make any sense to me.
   "Why should it, Mr. Aleksei Konsolikov?" Holland smiled. "Underneath that Anglo-Saxon exterior, education and all, beats the heart of a Russian. You're not sensitive to what some of us have to endure."
   "Huh?"
   "I'm a WASP, and 'blondie fruits' is but one more pejorative description given us by, I must admit, other trampled-upon minorities. Think about it. Armbruster, Swayne, Atkinson, Burton, Teagarten-'blondies' all. And Wall Street, certain firms in that originally WASP financial bastion, at any rate."
   "Medusa," said Alex, nodding. "Medusa and the Mafia. ... Holy Christ."
   "We've got a telephone number!" Peter leaned forward on the couch. "It was in the ledger Bourne brought out of Swayne's house."
   "I've tried it, remember? It's an answering machine, that's all it is."
   "And that's enough. We can get a location."
   "To what end? Whoever picks up the messages does it by remote, and if he or she has half a brain, it's done from a public phone. The relay is not only untraceable but capable of erasing all other messages, so we can't tap in."
   "You're not very into high tech, are you, Field Man?"
   "Let's put it this way," replied Conklin. "I bought one of those VCRs so I could watch old movies, and I can't figure out how to turn off the goddamn blinking clock. I called the dealer and he said, 'Read the instructions on the interior panel.' I can't find the interior panel."
   "Then let me explain what we can do to an answering machine. ... We can jam it externally."
   "Gee willikers, Sandy, what's next for Orphan Annie? What the hell is that going to do? Other than kill the source."
   "You're forgetting. We have the location from the numbers."
   "Oh?"
   "Someone has to come and repair the machine."
   "Oh."
   "We take him and find out who sent him there."
   "You know, Peter, you've got possibilities. For a neophyte, you understand, your current outrageously undeserved position notwithstanding."
   "Sorry I can't offer you a drink."
   Bryce Ogilvie, of the law firm Ogilvie, Spofford, Crawford and Cohen, was dictating a highly complex reply to the Justice Department's antitrust division when his very private telephone line rang; it rang only at his desk. He picked up the phone, pressed the green button and spoke rapidly. "Hold on," he ordered, looking up at his secretary. "Would you excuse me, please?"
   "Certainly, sir." The secretary got out of her chair, walked across the large impressive office and disappeared beyond the door.
   "Yes, what is it?" asked Ogilvie, returning to the phone.
   "The machine isn't working," said the voice on the sacrosanct line.
   "What happened?"
   "I don't know. All I get is a busy signal."
   "That's the best equipment available. Perhaps someone was calling in when you called."
   "I've been trying for the past two hours. There's a glitch. Even the best machines break down."
   "All right, send someone up to check it out. Use one of the niggers."
   "Naturally. No white man would go up there."

25
   It was shortly past midnight when Bourne got off the métro in Argenteuil. He had divided the day into segments, splitting the hours between the arrangements he had to make and looking for Marie, going from one arrondissement to another, scouting every café, every shop, every large and small hotel he could recall having been a part of their fugitive nightmare thirteen years ago. More than once he had gasped, seeing a woman in the distance or across a café-the back of a head, a quick profile, and twice a crown of dark red hair, any of which from a distance or in a café’s dim light might have belonged to his wife. None of these had turned out to be Marie, but he began to understand his own anxiety and, by understanding it, was better able to control it. These were the most impossible parts of the day; the rest was merely filled with difficulty and frustration.
   Alex! Where the hell was Conklin? He could not reach him in Virginia! Because of the time difference, he had counted on Alex to take care of the details, swiftly expediting the transfer of funds, primarily. The business day on the eastern seaboard of the United States began at four o'clock, Paris time, and the business day in Paris stopped at five o'clock or before, Paris time. That left barely an hour to release and transfer over a million American dollars to one Mr. Simon at his chosen bank in Paris, and that meant said Mr. Simon had to make himself known to the aforementioned, as yet unchosen, Paris bank. Bernardine had been helpful. Helpful, hell! He had made it possible.
   "There's a bank on the rue de Grenelle that the Deuxième frequently uses. They can be accommodating in terms of hours and the absence of an authentic signature or two, but they give nothing for nothing, and they trust no one, especially anyone associated with our benevolent socialist government."
   "You mean regardless of the teletypes, if the money's not there you don't get it."
   "Not a sou. The president, himself, could call and he would be told to pick it up in Moscow, where they firmly believe he belongs."
   "Since I can't reach Alex, I've bypassed the bank in Boston and called our man in the Cayman Islands, where Marie put the bulk of the money. He's Canadian and so's the bank. He's waiting for instructions."
   "I'll make a phone call. Are you at the Pont-Royal?"
   "No. I'll call you back."
   "Where are you?"
   "I suppose you could say I'm an anxious and confused butterfly going from one vaguely remembered place to another."
   "You are looking for her."
   "Yes. But then that wasn't a question, was it?"
   "Forgive me, but in some ways I hope you do not find her."
   "Thanks. I'll call you back in twenty minutes."
   He had gone to yet another point of recall, the Trocadéro, and the Palais de Chaillot. He had been shot at in the past on one of the terraces; there had been gunfire and men running down the endless stone steps, intermittently obscured by the huge gilded statues and the great sprays of the fountains, disappearing into the formal gardens, finally out of sight, out of range. What had happened? Why did he remember the Trocadéro? ... But Marie had been there-somewhere. Where had she been in that enormous complex? Where? ... A terrace! She had been on a terrace. Near a statue-what statue? ... Descartes? Racine? Talleyrand? The statue of Descartes came to his mind first. He would find it.
   He had found it and there was no Marie. He had looked at his watch; it had been nearly forty-five minutes since he had talked to Bernardine. Like the men in his inner screen, he had raced down the steps. To a telephone.
   "Go to the Banque Normandie and ask for Monsieur Tabouri. He understands that a Monsieur Simon intends to transfer over seven million francs from the Caymans by way of voice authorization through his private banker in the islands. He is most happy to let you use his phone, but believe me, he'll charge you for the call."
   "Thanks, François."
   "Where are you now?"
   "The Trocadéro. It's crazy. I have the damnedest feelings, like vibrations, but she's not there. It's probably the things I can't remember. Hell, I may have taken a bullet here, I simply don't know."
   "Go to the bank."
   He had done so, and within thirty-five minutes after his call to the Caymans, the olive-skinned, perpetually smiling Monsieur Tabouri confirmed that his funds were in place. He re quested 750,000 francs in the largest notes possible. They were delivered to him, and the grinning obsequious banker took him confidentially aside, away from the desk-which was rather foolish, as there was no one else in the office-and spoke quietly by a window.
   "There are some marvelous real estate opportunities in Beirut, believe me, I know. I am the expert on the Middle East and these stupid conflagrations cannot last much longer. Mon Dieu, no one will be left alive! It will once again rise as the Paris of the Mediterranean. Estates for a fraction of their value, hotels for a ridiculous price!"
   "It sounds interesting. I'll be in touch."
   He had fled the Banque Normandie as if its confines held the germs of a lethal disease. He had returned to the Pont-Royal, and again tried to reach Alex Conklin in the United States. It was then close to one o'clock in the afternoon in Vienna, Virginia, and still all he had heard was an answering machine with Alex's disembodied voice instructing the caller to leave a message. For any number of reasons, Jason had chosen not to do so.
   And now he was in Argenteuil, walking up the steps of the métro to the pavement, where he would slowly, cautiously make his way into the uglier streets and the vicinity of Le Coeur du Soldat. His instructions were clear. He was not to be the man he was last night, no limp, no ragged cast-off army clothing, no image that anyone might recognize. He was to be a simple laborer and reach the gates of the old closed-down refinery and smoke cigarettes while leaning against the wall. This was to take place between 12:30 and one o'clock in the morning. No sooner and no later.
   When he had asked Santos's messengers-after giving them several hundred francs for their inconvenience-the reason for these late-night precautions, the less inhibited man had replied, "Santos never leaves Le Coeur du Soldat."
   "He left last evening."
   "For minutes only," rejoined the more voluble messenger.
   "I understand." Bourne nodded, but he had not understood, he could only speculate. Was Santos in some way the Jackal's prisoner, confined to the sleazy café night and day? It was a fascinating query in light of the manager's size and sheer raw power, both combined with a far-above-average intellect.
   It was 12:37 when Jason, in blue jeans, cap and a dark, tattered V-necked sweater, reached the gates of the old factory. He took out a pack of Gauloise cigarettes and leaned against the wall, lighting one with a match, holding the flame longer than necessary before he blew it out. His thoughts returned to the enigmatic Santos, the premier conduit in Carlos's army, the most trusted satellite in the Jackal's orbit, a man whose French might have been formed at the Sorbonne, yet Santos was a Latin American. A Venezuelan, if Bourne's instincts had merit. Fascinating. And Santos wanted to see him 'with peace in his heart.' Bravo, amigo, thought Jason. Santos had reached a terrified ambassador in London with a question so loaded it made a political party's private poll look like the essence of nonpartisan neutrality. Atkinson had no choice but to state emphatically, if not in panic, that whatever instructions Snake Lady issued were to be carried out. The power of Snake Lady was the ambassador's only protection, his ultimate refuge.
   So Santos could bend; that decision was rooted in intellect, not loyalty, not obligation. The conduit wanted to crawl out of his sewer, and with three million francs in the offing, combined with a multitude of faraway places across the globe to choose from, the conduit's mind told him to listen, to consider. There were alternatives in life if opportunities were presented. One had been presented to Santos, vassal to Carlos, whose fealty to his lord had perhaps run its suffocating course. It was this instinctive projection that made Bourne include in his plea-calmly but firmly, the emphasis in understatement-such phrases as You could travel, disappear ... a wealthy man, free of care and unpleasant drudgery. The key words were "free" and "disappear," and Santos's eyes had responded. He was ready to take the three-million-franc bait, and Bourne was perfectly happy to let him break the line and swim with it.
   Jason looked at his watch; fifteen minutes had passed. No doubt Santos's minions were checking the streets, a final inspection before the high priest of conduits appeared. Bourne thought briefly of Marie, of the sensations he felt at the Trocadéro, remembering old Fontaine's words when the two of them watched the paths of Tranquility Inn from the high storage room, waiting for Carlos. He's near, I feel it. Like the approach of distant thunder. In a different-far different-way Jason had like feelings at the Trocadéro. Enough! Santos! The Jackal!
   His watch read one o'clock, and the two messengers from the Pont-Royal walked out of the alley and across the street to the gates of the old refinery.
   "Santos will see you now," said the voluble one.
   "I don't see him."
   "You are to come with us. He does not leave Le Coeur du Soldat."
   "Why do I find that not to my liking?"
   "There's no reason for such feelings. He has peace in his heart."
   "What about his knife?"
   "He has no knife, no weapon. He never carries either."
   "That's nice to hear. Let's go."
   "He has no need for such weapons," added the messenger, disquietingly.
   He was escorted down the alley, past the neon-lit entrance, to a barely negotiable break in the buildings. One by one, Jason between the two, men, they made their way to the rear of the café, where there was just about the last thing Bourne expected to see in this run-down section of the city. It was ... well, an English garden. A plot of ground perhaps thirty feet in length, twenty in depth, and trellises supporting a variety of flowering vines, a barrage of color in the French moonlight.
   "That's quite a sight," commented Jason. "It didn't come about through neglect."
   "Ah, it is a passion with Santos! No one understands it, but no one touches a single flower, either."
   Fascinating.
   Bourne was led to a small outside elevator whose steel frame was attached to the stone wall of the building. There was no other access in sight. The conveyance barely held the three of them, and once the iron gate was closed, the silent messenger pressed a button in the darkness and spoke. "We are here, Santos. Camellia. Bring us up."
   "Camellia?" asked Jason.
   "He knows everything is all right. If not, my friend might have said 'lily' or 'rose.' "
   "What would happen then?"
   "You don't want to think about it. I don't care to think about it."
   "Naturally. Of course."
   The outside elevator stopped with a disturbing double jerk, and the quiet messenger opened a thick steel door that required his full weight to open. Bourne was led into the familiar room with the tasteful, expensive furniture, the bookcases and the single floor lamp that illuminated Santos in his outsized armchair. "You may leave, my friends," said the large man, addressing the messengers. "Pick up your money from the faggot, and for God's sake, tell him to give René and the American who calls himself Ralph fifty francs apiece and get them out of here. They're pissing in the corners. ... Say the money's from their friend from last night who forgot about them."
   "Oh, shit!" exploded Jason.
   "You did forget, didn't you?" Santos grinned.
   "I've had other things on my mind."
   "Yes, sir! Yes, Santos!" The two messengers, instead of heading for the back of the room and the elevator, opened a door in the left wall and disappeared. Bourne looked after them, bewildered.
   "There is a staircase leading to our kitchen, such as it is," said Santos, answering Jason's unspoken question. "The door can be opened from this side, not from the steps below except by me. ... Sit down, Monsieur Simon. You are my guest. How is your head?"
   "The swelling's gone down, thank you." Bourne sat on the large couch, sinking into the pillows; it was not an authoritative position, nor was it not meant to be. "I understand you have peace in your heart."
   "And a desire for three million francs in the avaricious section of that heart."
   "Then you were satisfied with your call to London?"
   "No one could have programmed that man into reacting the way he did. There is a Snake Lady and she instills extraordinary devotion and fear in high places-which means that female serpent is not without power."
   "That's what I tried to tell you."
   "Your word is accepted. Now, let me recapitulate your request, your demand, as it were-"
   "My restrictions," interrupted Jason.
   "Very well, your restrictions," agreed Santos. "You and you alone must reach the blackbird, correct?"
   "It's an absolute."
   "Again, I must ask why?"
   "Speaking frankly, you already know too much, more than my clients realize, but then none of them was about to lose his own life on the second floor of a café in Argenteuil. They want nothing to do with you, they want no traces, and in that area you're vulnerable."
   "How?" Santos crashed his fist against the arm of the chair.
   "An old man in Paris with a police record who tried to warn a member of the Assembly that he was to be assassinated. He was the one who mentioned the blackbird; he was the one who spoke of Le Coeur du Soldat. Fortunately, our man heard him and silently passed the word to my clients, but that's not good enough. How many other old men in Paris in their senile delusions may mention Le Coeur du Soldat-and you? ... No, you can have nothing to do with my clients."
   "Even through you?"
   "I disappear, you don't. Although, in all honesty, I believe you should think about doing so. ... Here, I brought you something." Bourne sat forward on the couch and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a roll of tightly wound franc notes held together by a thick elastic band. He threw it over to Santos, who caught it effortlessly in midair. "Two hundred thousand francs on account-I was authorized to give this to you. On a best-efforts basis. You give me the information I need, I deliver it to London, and whether or not the blackbird accepts my clients' offer, you still receive the balance of the three million."
   "But you could disappear before then, couldn't you?"
   "Have me watched as you've been doing, have me followed to London and back. I'll even call you with the names of the airlines and the flight numbers. What could be fairer?"
   "One thing more could be fairer, Monsieur Simon," replied Santos, pushing his immense frame out of the chair and baronially striding to a card table against the lacquered brick wall of his flat. "If you will, please come over here."
   Jason rose from the couch and walked over to the card table, instantly astonished. "You're thorough, aren't you?"
   "I try to be. ... Oh, don't blame the concierges, they belong to you. I'm much further below scale. Chambermaids and stewards are more to my liking. They're not so spoiled and nobody really misses them if they don't show up one day."
   Spread across the table were Bourne's three passports, courtesy of Cactus in Washington, as well as the gun and the knife taken from him last night. "You're very convincing, but it doesn't solve anything, does it?"
   "We'll see," answered Santos. "I'll accept your money now-for my best efforts-but instead of your flying to London, have London fly to Paris. Tomorrow morning. When he arrives at the Pont-Royal, you'll call me-I'll give you my private number, of course-and we'll play the Soviets' game. Exchange for exchange, like walking across a bridge with our respective prisoners in tow. The money for the information."
   "You're crazy, Santos. My clients don't expose themselves that way. You just lost the rest of the three million."
   "Why not try them? They could always hire a blind, couldn't they? An innocent tourist with a false bottom in his or her Louis Vuitton carryon? No alarms are set off with paper. Try it! It is the only way you'll get what you want, monsieur."
   "I'll do what I can," said Bourne.
   "Here is my telephone." Santos picked up a prearranged card from the table with numbers scrawled across it. "Call me when London arrives. In the meantime, I assure you, you will be watched."
   "You're a real swell guy."
   "I'll escort you to the elevator."
   Marie sat up in bed, sipping hot tea in the dark room, listening to the sounds of Paris outside the windows. Not only was sleep impossible, but it was intolerable, a waste of time when every hour counted. She had taken the earliest flight from Marseilles to Paris and had gone directly to the Meunce on the rue de Rivoli, the same hotel where she had waited thirteen years ago, waited for a man to listen to reason or lose his life, and in doing so, losing a large part of hers. She had ordered a pot of tea then, and he had come back to her; she ordered tea now from the night floor steward, absently perhaps, as if the repeated ritual might bring about a repetition of his appearance so long ago.
   Oh, God, she had seen him! It was no illusion, no mistake, it was David! She had left the hotel at midmorning and begun wandering, going down the list she had made on the plane, heading from one location to another without any logical sequence in mind, simply following the succession of places as they had come to her-that was her sequence. It was a lesson she had learned from Jason Bourne thirteen years ago: When running or hunting, analyze your options but remember your first. It's usually the cleanest and the best. Most of the time you'll take it.
   So she had followed the list, from the pier of the Bateau Mouche at the base of the avenue George V to the bank on the Madeleine ... to the Trocadéro. She had wandered aimlessly along the terraces of the last, as if in a trance, looking for a statue she could not remember, jostled by the intermittent groups of tourists led by loud, officious guides. The huge statues all began to look alike; she had felt light-headed. The late August sun was blinding. She was about to sit down on a marble bench, remembering yet another dictate from Jason Bourne: Rest is a weapon. Suddenly, up ahead, she saw a man wearing a cap and a dark V-necked sweater; he had turned and raced toward the palatial stone steps that led to the avenue Gustave V. She knew that run, that stride; she knew it better than anyone! How often had she watched him-frequently from behind bleachers, sight unseen-as he had pounded around the university track, ridding himself of the furies that had gripped him. It was David! She had leaped up from the bench and raced after him.
   "David! David, it's me! ... Jason!"
   She had collided with a tour guide leading a group of Japanese. The man was incensed; she was furious, so she furiously pummeled her way through the astonished Orientals, the majority shorter than she was, but her superior sight lines were no help. Her husband had disappeared. Where had he gone? Into the gardens? Into the street with the crowds and the traffic from the Pont d'Iéna? For Christ's sake, where?
   "Jason!" she had screamed at the top of her voice. "Jason, come back!"
   People had looked at her, some with the empathetic glances of lovers burned, most simply disapproving. She had run down the never-ending steps to the street, spending-how long a time she could not recall-searching for him. Finally, in exhaustion, she had taken a taxi back to the Meurice. In a daze, she reached her room and fell on the bed, refusing to let the tears come. It was no time for tears. It was a time for a brief rest and food; energy to be restored, the lessons of Jason Bourne. Then back into the streets, the hunt to continue. And as she lay there, staring at the wall, she felt a swelling in her chest, in her lungs perhaps, and it was accompanied by a sense of passive elation. As she was looking for David, he was looking for her. Her husband had not run away, even Jason Bourne had not run away. Neither part of the same man could have seen her. There had been another unknown reason for the sudden, hurried exit from the Trocadéro, but there was only one reason for his being at the Trocadéro. He, too, was searching what memories he had of Paris thirteen years ago. He, too, understood that somewhere, someplace in those memories he would find her.
   She had rested, ordered room service and two hours later gone out again into the streets.
   Now, at the moment, as she drank her tea, she could not wait for the light to come. The day ahead was meant for searching.
   "Bernardine!"
   "Mon Dieu, it is four o'clock in the morning, so I can assume you have something vital to tell this seventy-year-old man."
   "I've got a problem."
   "I think you have many problems, but I suppose it's a minor distinction. What is it?"
   "I'm as close as I can be but I need an end man."
   "Please speak clearer English, or if you will, far clearer French. It must be an American term, this 'end man.' But then you have so many esoteric phrases. I'm sure someone sits in Langley and thinks them up."
   "Come on, I haven't time for your bon mots."
   "You come on, my friend. I'm not trying to be clever, I'm trying to wake up. ... There, my feet are on the floor and a cigarette's in my mouth. Now, what is it?"
   "My access to the Jackal expects an Englishman to fly over from London this morning with two million eight hundred thousand francs-"
   "Far less than you have at your disposal, I assume," interrupted Bernardine. "The Banque Normandie was accommodating, was it not?"
   "Very. The money's there, and that Tabouri of yours is a beaut. He tried to sell me real estate in Beirut."
   "That Tabouri is a thief-but Beirut is interesting."
   "Please."
   "Sorry. Go ahead."
   "I'm being watched, so I can't go to the bank, and I don't have any Englishman to bring what I can't get to the Pont-Royal."
   "That's your problem?"
   "Yes."
   "Are you willing to part with, say, fifty thousand francs?"
   "What for?"
   "Tabouri."
   "I suppose so."
   "You signed papers, of course."
   "Of course."
   "Sign another paper, handwritten by you and also signed, releasing the money to– Wait a moment, I must go to my desk." There was silence on the line as Bernardine obviously went to another room in his flat; his voice returned. "Allo?"
   "I'm here."
   "Oh, this is lovely," intoned the former Deuxième specialist. "I sank him in his sailboat off the shoals of the Costa Brava. The sharks had a feeding frenzy; he was so fat and delectable. The name is Antonio Scarzi, a Sardinian who traded drugs for information, but you know nothing about that, of course."
   "Of course." Bourne repeated the last name, spelling it out.
   "Correct. Seal the envelope, rub a pencil or a pen over your thumb and press your prints along the seal. Then give it to the concierge for Mr. Scarzi."
   "Understood. What about the Englishman? This morning? It's only a few hours away."
   "The Englishman is not a problem. The morning is-the few hours are. It's a simple matter to transfer funds from one bank to another-buttons are pressed, computers instantly cross-check the data, and, poof, figures are entered on paper. It's quite another thing to collect nearly three million francs in cash, and your access certainly won't accept pounds or dollars for fear of being caught exchanging them or depositing them. Add to this the problem of collecting notes large enough to be part of a bundle small enough to be concealed from customs inspectors. ... Your access, mon ami, has to be aware of these difficulties."
   Jason looked aimlessly at the wall, his thoughts on Bernardine's words. "You think he's testing me?"
   "He has to."
   "The money could be gotten together from the foreign departments of different banks. A small private plane could hop across the channel and land in a pasture where a car's waiting to bring the man to Paris."
   "Bien. Of course. However, these logistics take time even for the most influential people. Don't make it all appear too simple, that would be suspect. Keep your access informed as to the progress being made, emphasizing the secrecy, how there can be no risk of exposure, explain the delays. If there were none, he might think it's a trap."
   "I see what you mean. It comes down to what you just said-don't make it seem so easy because that's not credible."
   "There's something else, mon ami. A chameleon may be many things in daylight; still, he is safer in darkness."
   "You forgot something," said Bourne. "What about the Englishman?"
   "Tallyho, old chap," said Bernardine.
   The operation went as smoothly as any Jason had ever engineered or been witness to, perhaps thanks to the flair of a resentful talented man who had been sent to the pastures too soon. While throughout the day Bourne made progress calls to Santos, Bernardine had someone other than himself pick up the sealed instructions from the concierge and bring them to him, at which point he made his appointment with Monsieur Tabouri. Shortly after four-thirty in the afternoon, the Deuxième veteran walked into the Pont-Royal dressed in a dark pin-striped suit so obviously British that it screamed Savile Row. He went to the elevator and eventually, after two wrong turns, reached Bourne's room.
   "Here's the money," he said, dropping the attaché case on the floor and going straight to Jason's hotel wet bar; he removed two miniature bottles of Tanqueray gin, snapped them open and poured the liquor into a questionably clean glass. "A votre santé," he added, swallowing half his drink before breathing heavily through his mouth and then rapidly swallowing the rest. "I haven't done anything like that in years."
   "You haven't?"
   "Frankly, no. I had others do such things. It's far too dangerous. ... Nevertheless, Tabouri is forever in your debt, and, frankly, he's convinced me I should look into Beirut."
   "What?"
   "Of course, I haven't your resources, but a percentage of forty years of les fonds de contingence have found their way to Geneva on my behalf. I'm not a poor man."
   "You may be a dead man if they pick you up leaving here."
   "Oh, but I shan't go," said Bernardine, once again searching the small refrigerator. "I shall stay in this room until you have concluded your business." François ripped open two additional bottles and poured them into his glass. "Now, perhaps, my old heart will beat slower," he added as he walked to the inadequate desk, placed his drink on the blotter, and proceeded to take out two automatics and three grenades from his pockets, placing them all in a row in front of his glass. "Yes, I will relax now."
   "What the hell is that-are they?" cried Jason.
   "I think you Americans call it deterrence," replied Bernardine. "Although I frankly believe both you and the Soviets are playing with yourselves as you both put so much money into weaponry that doesn't work. Now, I come from a different era. When you go out to do your business, you will leave the door open. If someone comes down that narrow corridor, he will see a grenade in my hand. That is not nuclear abstraction, that is deterrence."
   "I'll buy it," said Bourne, going to the door. "I want to get this over with."
   Out on Montalembert, Jason walked to the corner, and as he had done at the old factory in Argenteuil, leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. He waited, his posture casual, his mind in high gear.
   A man walked across from the bisecting rue du Bac toward him. It was the talkative messenger from last night; he approached, his hand in his jacket pocket.
   "Where's the money?" said the man in French.
   "Where's the information?" answered Bourne.
   "The money first."
   "That's not the arrangement." Without warning, Jason grabbed the minion from Argenteuil by his lapel, yanking him forward off his feet. Bourne whipped up his free hand and gripped the messenger's throat, his fingers digging into the man's flesh. "You go back and tell Santos he's got a one-way ticket to hell. I don't deal this way."
   "Enough!" said the low voice, its owner rounding the corner on Jason's right. The huge figure of Santos approached. "Let him go, Simon. He is nothing. It is now only you and me."
   "I thought you never left Le Coeur du Soldat?"
   "You've changed that, haven't you?"
   "Apparently." Bourne released the messenger, who looked at Santos. With a gesture of his large head, the man raced away.
   "Your Englishman arrived," said Santos when they were alone. "He carried a valise, I saw for myself."
   "He arrived carrying a valise," agreed Jason.
   "So London capitulates, no? London is very anxious."
   "The stakes are very high and that's all I'll say about it. The information, please."
   "Let us first again define the procedure, shall we?"
   "We've defined it several times. ... You give me the information, my client tells me to act upon it; and if satisfactory contact is made, I bring you the remainder of the three million francs."
   "You say 'satisfactory contact.' What will satisfy you? How will you know the contact is firm? How do I know that you will not claim it is unsatisfactory and steal my money when, indeed, you have made the connection your clients have paid for?"
   "You're a suspicious fellow, aren't you?"
   "Oh, very suspicious. Our world, Mr. Simon, is not peopled with saints, is it?"
   "Perhaps more than you realize."
   "That would astonish me. Please answer my questions."
   "All right, I'll try. ... How will I know the contact's firm? That's easy. I'll simply know because it's my business to know. It's what I'm paid for, and a man in my position does not make mistakes at this level and live to apologize. I've refined the process, done my research, and I'll ask two or three questions myself. Then I'll know-one way or another."
   "That's an elusive reply."
   "In our world, Mr. Santos, being elusive is hardly a negative, is it? ... As to your concern that I would lie to you and take your money, let me assure you I don't cultivate enemies like you and the network your blackbird obviously controls any more than I would make enemies of my clients. That way is madness and a much shorter life."
   "I admire your perspicacity as well as your caution," said the Jackal's intermediary.
   "The bookcases didn't lie. You're a learned man."
   "That's neither here nor there, but I have certain credentials. Appearances can be a liability as well as an asset. ... What I am about to tell you, Mr. Simon, is known by only four men on the face of the earth, all of whom speak French fluently. How you wish to use that information is up to you. However, if you even hint at Argenteuil, I'll know it instantly and you will never leave the Pont-Royal alive."
   "The contact can be made so quickly?"
   "With a telephone number. But you will not place the call for at least an hour from the moment we part. If you do, again I will know it, and again I tell you you're a dead man."
   "An hour. Agreed. ... Only three other people have this number? Why not pick one you're not particularly fond of so I might peripherally allude to him-if it's necessary."
   Santos permitted himself a small, flat smile. "Moscow," he said softly. "High up in Dzerzhinsky Square."
   "The KGB?"
   "The blackbird is building a cadre in Moscow, always Moscow, it's an obsession with him."
   Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, thought Bourne. Trained at Novgorod. Dismissed by the Komitet as a maniac. The Jackal!
   "I'll bear it in mind-if it's called for. The number, please?"
   Santos recited it twice along with the words Bourne was to say. He spoke slowly, obviously impressed that Bourne wrote nothing down. "Is it all clear?"
   "Indelibly, no pencil or paper required. ... If everything goes as I trust it will, how do you want me to get you the money?"
   "Phone me; you've got my number. I will leave Argenteuil and come to you. And never return to Argenteuil."
   "Good luck, Santos. Something tells me you deserve it."
   "No one more so. I have drunk the hemlock far too many times."
   "Socrates," said Jason.
   "Not directly. Plato's dialogues, to be precise. Au revoir."
   Santos walked away, and Bourne, his chest pounding, headed back to the Pont-Royal, desperately suppressing his desire to run. A running man is an object of curiosity, a target. A lesson from the cantos of Jason Bourne.
   "Bernardine!" he yelled, racing down the narrow, deserted hallway to his room, all too aware of the open door and the old man seated at the desk, a grenade in one hand, a gun in the other. "Put the hardware away, we've hit pay dirt!"
   "Who's paying?" asked the Deuxième veteran as Jason closed the door.
   "I am," answered Bourne. "If this works out the way I think it will, you can add to your account in Geneva."
   "I do not do what I'm doing for that, my friend. It has never been a consideration."
   "I know, but as long as we're passing out francs like we're printing them in the garage, why shouldn't you get a fair share?"
   "I can't argue with that, either."
   "An hour," announced Jason. "Forty-three minutes now, to be exact."
   "For what?"
   "To find out if it's real, actually real." Bourne fell on the bed, his arms behind his head on the pillow, his eyes alive. "Write this down, François." Jason recited the telephone number given him by Santos. "Buy, bribe, or threaten every high-level contact you've ever had in the Paris telephone service, but get me the location of that number."
   "It's not such an expensive request-"
   "Yes, it is," countered Bourne. "He's got it guarded, inviolate; he wouldn't do it any other way. Only four people in his entire network have it."
   "Then, perhaps, we do not go high-level, but, instead, far lower to the ground, underground actually. Into the tunnels of the telephone service beneath the streets."
   Jason snapped his head over at Bernardine. "I hadn't thought of that."
   "Why should you? You are not Deuxième. The technicians are the source, not the bureaucrats behind the desks. ... I know several. I will find one and give him a quiet call at home later tonight-"
   "Tonight?" broke in Bourne, raising himself off the bed.
   "It will cost a thousand francs or so, but you'll get the location of the telephone."
   "I can't wait until later tonight."
   "Then you add a risk by trying to reach such a man at work. These men are monitored; no one trusts anyone in the telephone service. It's the Socialists' paradox: Give its laboring forces responsibility but no individual authority."
   "Hold it!" said Jason from the bed. "You have the home phone numbers, right?"
   "They're in the book, yes. These people don't keep private listings."
   "Have someone's wife call. An emergency. Someone's got to get home."
   Bernardine nodded his head. "Not bad, my friend. Not bad at all."
   The minutes turned into quarter hours as the retired Deuxième officer went to work, unctuously, with promises of reward for the wives of telephone technicians, if they would do what he asked them to do. Two hung up on him, three turned him down with epithets born of the suspicious Paris curbsides; but the sixth, amid obscenities, declared, "Why not?" As long as the rodent she had married understood that the money was hers.
   The hour was over, and Jason left the hotel, walking slowly, deliberately, down the pavement, crossing four streets until he saw a public phone on the Quai Voltaire by the Seine. A blanket of darkness was slowly floating down over Paris, the boats on the river and the bridges dotted with lights. As he approached the red kiosk he breathed steadily, inhaling deeply, exercising a control over himself that he never thought possible. He was about to place the most important phone call of his life, but he could not let the Jackal know that, if, indeed, it was the Jackal. He went inside, inserted the coin and dialed.
   "Yes?" It was a woman's voice, the French oui sharp and harsh. A Parisienne.
   "Blackbirds circle in the sky," said Bourne, repeating Santos's words in French. "They make a great deal of noise, all but one. He is silent."
   "Where do you call from?"
   "Here in Paris, but I am not from Paris."
   "From where, then?"
   "Where the winters are far colder," answered Jason, feeling the moisture on his hairline. Control. Control! "It is urgent that I reach a blackbird."
   The line was suddenly filled with silence, a sonic void, and Bourne stopped breathing. Then came the voice, low, steady, and as hollow as the previous silence. "We speak to a Muscovite?"
   The Jackal! It was the Jackal! The smooth, swift French could not hide the Latino trace. "I did not say that," answered Bourne; his own French dialect was one he employed frequently, with the guttural tinge of Gascony. "I merely said the winters were colder than Paris."
   "Who is this?"
   "Someone who is considered by someone who knows you sufficiently impressive to be given this number along with the proper words to go with it. I can offer you the contract of your career, of your life. The fee is immaterial-name your own-but those who pay are among the most powerful men in the United States. They control much of American industry, as well as that country's financial institutions, and have direct access to the nerve centers of the government."
   "This is also a very strange call. Very unorthodox."
   "If you're not interested, I'll forget this number and go elsewhere. I'm merely the broker. A simple yes or no will suffice."
   "I do not commit to things I know nothing about, to people I never heard of."
   "You'd recognize their positions, if I were at liberty to reveal them, believe that. However, I'm not seeking a commitment, only your interest at this point. If the answer is yes, I can reveal more. If it's no, well, I tried, but am forced to go elsewhere. The newspapers say he was in Brussels only yesterday. I'll find him." There was a short, sharp intake of breath at the mention of Brussels and the unspoken Jason Bourne. "Yes or no, blackbird?"
   Silence. Finally the Jackal spoke. "Call me back in two hours," he ordered, hanging up the phone.
   It was done! Jason leaned against the pay phone, the sweat pouring down his face and breaking out on his neck. The Pont-Royal. He had to get back to Bernardine!
   "It was Carlos!" he announced, closing the door and crossing directly to the bedside phone while taking Santos's card out of his pocket. He dialed; in seconds, he spoke. "The bird's confirmed," he said. "Give me a name, any name." The pause was brief. "I've got it. The merchandise will be left with the concierge. It'll be locked and taped; count it and send my passports back to me. Have your best boy pick everything up and call off the dogs. They could lead a blackbird to you." Jason hung up and turned to Bernardine.
   "The telephone number is in the fifteenth arrondissement," said the Deuxième veteran. "Our man knew that, or at least assumed it when I gave it to him."
   "What's he going to do?"
   "Go back into the tunnels and refine things further."
   "Will he call us here?"
   "Fortunately, he drives a motorbike. He said he would be back at work in ten minutes or so and reach us by this room number within the hour."
   "Perfect!"
   "Not entirely. He wants five thousand francs."
   "He could have asked ten times that. ... What's 'within the hour'? How long before he calls?"
   "You were gone perhaps thirty, thirty-five minutes, and he reached me shortly after you left. I'd say within the next half hour."
   The telephone rang. Twenty seconds later they had an address on the boulevard Lefebvre.
   "I'm leaving," said Jason Bourne, taking Bernardine's automatic off the desk and putting two grenades in his pocket. "Do you mind?"
   "Be my guest," replied the Deuxième, reaching under his jacket and removing a second weapon from his belt. "Pickpockets so abound in Paris one should always carry a backup. ... But what for?"
   "I've got at least a couple of hours and I want to look around."
   "Alone?"
   "How else? If we call for support, I risk being gunned down or spending the rest of my life in jail for an assassination in Belgium I had nothing to do with."
   Former judge of the first circuit court in Boston, the once Honorable Brendan Patrick Prefontaine, watched the weeping, disconsolate Randolph Gates as he sat forward on the couch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, his face in his widespread hands.
   "Oh, good Christ, how the mighty fall with such a thud of finality," observed Brendan, pouring himself a short bourbon on the rocks. "So you got snookered, Randy. French style. Your facile brain and your imperial presence didn't help you very much when you saw Paree, huh? You should have stayed 'down on the farm,' soldier boy."
   "My God, Prefontaine, you don't know what it was like! I was setting up a cartel-Paris, Bonn, London and New York with the Far East labor markets-an enterprise worth billions when I was taken from the Plaza-Athénée and put in a car and blindfolded. Then I was thrown into a plane and flown to Marseilles, where the most horrible things happened to me. I was kept in a room, and every few hours I was injected-for over six weeks! Women were brought in, films taken-I wasn't myself!"
   "Maybe you were the self you never recognized, Dandy Boy. The same self that learned to anticipate instant gratification, if I use the phrase correctly. Make your clients extraordinary profits on paper, which they trade on the exchanges while thousands of jobs are lost in buy-outs. Oh, yes, my dear royalist, that's instant gratification."
   "You're wrong, Judge-"
   "So lovely to hear that term again. Thank you, Randy."
   "The unions became too strong. Industry was being crippled. Many companies had to go overseas to survive!"
   "And not talk? Oddly enough, you may have a point, but you never considered an alternative. ... Regardless, we stray. You emerged from your confinement in Marseilles an addict and, of course, there were the films of the eminent attorney in compromising situations."
   "What could I do?" screamed Gates. "I was ruined!"
   "We know what you did. You became this Jackal's confidence man in the world of high finance, a world where competition is undesirable baggage better lost along the way."
   "It's how he found me to begin with. The cartel we were forming was opposed by Japanese and Taiwanese interests. They hired him. ... Oh, my God, he'll kill me!"
   "Again?" asked the judge.
   "What?"
   "You forget. He thinks you're already dead-thanks to me."
   "I have cases coming up, a congressional hearing next week. He'll know I'm alive!"
   "Not if you don't show up."
   "I have to! My clients expect-"
   "Then I agree," interrupted Prefontaine. "He'll kill you. Sorry about that, Randy."
   "What am I going to do?"
   "There's a way, Dandy Boy, not only out of your current dilemma but for years to come. Of course, it will require some sacrifice on your part. For starters, a long convalescence at a private rehabilitation center, but even before that, your complete cooperation right now. The first ensures your imminent disappearance, the second-the capture and elimination of Carlos the Jackal. You'll be free, Randy."
   "Anything!"
   "How do you reach him?"
   "I have a telephone number!" Gates fumbled for his wallet, yanking it out of his pocket and with trembling fingers digging into a recess. "Only four people alive have it!"
   Prefontaine accepted his first $20,000-an-hour fee, instructed Randy to go home, beg Edith's forgiveness, and be prepared to leave Boston tomorrow. Brendan had heard of a private treatment center in Minneapolis, he thought, where the rich sought help incognito; he would refine the details in the morning and call him, naturally expecting a second payment for his services. The instant a shaken Gates left the room, Prefontaine went to the phone and called John St. Jacques at Tranquility Inn.
   "John, it's the judge. Don't ask me questions, but I have urgent information that could be invaluable to your sister's husband. I realize I can't reach him, but I know he's dealing with someone in Washington-"
   "His name is Alex Conklin," interrupted St. Jacques. "Wait a minute, Judge, Marie wrote the number down on the desk blotter. Let me get over there." The sound of one phone being placed on a hard surface preceded the clicks of another being picked up. "Here it is." Marie's brother recited the number.
   "I'll explain everything later. Thank you, John."
   "An awful lot of people keep telling me that, goddamn it!" said St. Jacques.
   Prefontaine dialed the number with a Virginia area code. It was answered with a short, brusque "Yes?"
   "Mr. Conklin, my name is Prefontaine and I was given this number by John St. Jacques. What I have to tell you is in the nature of an emergency."
   "You're the judge," broke in Alex.
   "Past tense, I'm afraid. Very past."
   "What is it?"
   "I know how to reach the man you call the Jackal."
   "What?"
   "Listen to me."
   Bernardine stared at the ringing telephone, briefly debating with himself whether or not to pick it up. There was no question; he had to. "Yes?"
   "Jason? It's you, isn't it? ... Perhaps I have the wrong room."
   "Alex? This is you?"
   "François? What are you doing there? Where's Jason?"
   "Things have happened so fast. I know he's been trying to reach you."
   "It's been a rough day. We've got Panov back."
   "That's good news."
   "I've got other news. A telephone number where the Jackal can be reached."
   "We've got it! And a location. Our man left an hour ago."
   "For Christ's sake, how did you get it?"
   "A convoluted process I sincerely believe only your man could have negotiated. He's brilliantly imaginative, a true caméléon."
   "Let's compare," said Conklin. "What's yours?"
   Bernardine complied, reciting the number he had written down on Bourne's instructions.
   The silence on the phone was a silent scream. "They're different," said Alex finally, his voice choked. "They're different!"
   "A trap," said the Deuxième veteran. "God in heaven, it's a trap!"

26
   Twice Bourne had passed the dark, quiet row of old stone houses on the boulevard Lefebvre in the concrete backwater of the fifteenth arrondissement. He then doubled back to the rue d'Alésia and found a sidewalk café. The outdoor tables, their candles flickering under glass, were peopled mostly by gesturing, argumentative students from the nearby Sorbonne and Montparnasse. It was nearing ten o'clock and the aproned waiters were growing irritable; the majority of customers were not full of largess, either in their hearts or in their pockets. Jason wanted only a strong espresso, but the perpetual scowl on the face of the approaching garçon convinced him he would get mud if he ordered only the coffee, so he added the most expensive brandy he could recall by name.
   As the waiter returned to the service bar, Jason pulled out his small notebook and ballpoint pen, shutting his eyes for a moment, then opening them and sketching out everything he could envision from the row of houses on his inner screen. There were three structures of two attached houses each, separated by two narrow alleyways. Each double complex was three stories high, each front entrance reached by climbing a steep flight of brick steps, and at either end of the row were vacant lots covered with rubble, the remains of demolished adjacent buildings. The address of the Jackal's buried telephone number-the address was available in the underground tunnels solely for repair purposes-was the final structure on the right, and it took no imagination to know he occupied the entire building, if not the entire row.
   Carlos was the consummate self-protector, so one had to assume that his Paris command post would be a fortress, employing every human and electronic security device that loyalty and high technology could provide. And the seemingly isolated, all but deserted, section of the outlying fifteenth arrondissement served his purposes far better than any crowded section of the city. For that reason, Bourne had first paid a drunken tramp to walk with him during his initial foray past the houses, he himself limping unsteadily in the shadows beside his companion; and for his second appraisal, he had hired a middle-aged whore as his cover, with no limp or stagger in his gait. He knew the terrain now, for all the good it did him, but it was the beginning of the end. He swore himself to that!
   The waiter arrived with his espresso and the cognac, and only when Jason placed a hundred-franc note on the table, accompanied by a wave of his hand, did the man's hostile countenance move to neutral ground. "Merci," he mumbled.
   "Is there a pay phone nearby?" asked Bourne, removing an additional ten-franc note.
   "Down the street, fifty, sixty meters," replied the waiter, his eyes on the new money.
   "Nothing closer?" Jason peeled off another note, twenty francs. "I'm calling right here within a few blocks."
   "Come with me," said the aproned garçon, gingerly picking up the franc notes and leading Bourne through the open doors of the café to a cashier seated on high at the far end of the restaurant. The gaunt, sallow-faced woman looked annoyed; obviously she assumed that Bourne was a discontented customer.
   "Let him use your telephone," said the waiter.
   "Why?" spat out the harridan. "So he can call China?"
   "He calls up the street. He will pay."
   Jason proffered a ten-franc note, his innocent eyes looking blankly at the highly suspicious woman. "Augh, take it," she said, removing a phone from under her cash-register stand and grasping the money. "It has an extension so you can move to the wall, as they all do. Men! Business and the bed, it's all you think about!"
   He dialed the Pont-Royal and asked for his room, expecting Bernardine to pick up on the first or second ring. By the fourth, he was concerned; by the eighth, he was profoundly disturbed. Bernardine was not there! Had Santos ... ? No, the Deuxième veteran was armed and knew how to use his "deterrence"-there would have been at the least loud gunfire, at the last a room blown apart by a grenade. Bernardine had left under his own control. Why?
   There could be any one of several reasons, thought Bourne, handing back the telephone and returning to his table outside. The first and most wished for was news of Marie; the old intelligence officer would not raise false hopes by detailing the nets he had spread throughout the city, but they were there, Jason was sure of it. ... Bourne could not think of another reason, so it was best not to think about Bernardine. He had other pressing considerations, the most intensely pressing of his life. He returned to the strong coffee and his notebook; every detail had to be exact.
   An hour later he finished his espresso, taking a sip of the cognac and spilling the rest on the pavement under the usual soiled red tablecloth. He left the café and the rue d'Alésia, turning right and walking slowly, as a far older man might walk, toward the boulevard Lefebvre. The closer he came to the last corner, the more he became aware of the undulating, erratic sounds from apparently different directions. Sirens! The two-note sirens of the Paris police! What had happened? What was happening? Jason abandoned his elderly gait and ran to the edge of the building fronting the Lefebvre and the row of old stone houses. Instantly, he was in shock, fury and astonishment joining together in panic. What were they doing?
   Five patrol cars converged on the row of stone houses, each successively screeching to a halt in front of the structure on the right. Then a large black police van appeared, swinging directly around to face the two entrances of the building, its searchlight shooting out as a squad of black-uniformed men with automatic weapons leaped into the street and took up crouching attack positions only partially concealed by the patrol cars-an assault was in the making!
   Fools. Goddamned fools! To give Carlos a warning was to lose the Jackal! Killing was his profession; escape, his obsession. Thirteen years ago Bourne had been told that Carlos's huge retreat in the village hills of Vitry-sur-Seine outside Paris had more false walls and concealed staircases than a nobleman's Loire château in the time of Louis XIV. The fact that no one had ever determined which estate it was, or whom it was assigned to, did not vitiate the all too acceptable rumors. And with three supposedly separated structures on the boulevard Lefebvre, it was also all too acceptable to presuppose hidden underground tunnels linking each to the others.
   For Christ's sake, who had done this? Had a terrible error been made? Had he and Bernardine been so obtuse as to think the Deuxième or Peter Holland's Paris station of the CIA had overlooked tapping into his Pont-Royal telephone or bribed or enlisted the various relays of operators on the hotel's switchboard? If so, that obtuseness was rooted in an absolute: it was next to impossible to tap a phone on short notice in a relatively small hotel without being detected. Technology required a stranger on the premises, and bribe money spread around was countered with larger bribes by the subject under surveillance. Santos? Bugs placed in the room by a chambermaid or a bellman? Not likely. The huge conduit to the Jackal, especially if he had reneged on their contract, would not expose the Jackal. Who? How? The questions burned into Jason's imagination as he watched in horror and dismay the scene taking place on the boulevard Lefebvre.
   "On police authority, all residents will evacuate the building." The orders over the loudspeaker metallically echoed throughout the street. "You have one minute before we take aggressive procedures."
   What aggressive procedures? screamed Bourne into the silent void of his mind. You've lost him. I've lost him. Insanity! Who? Why?
   The door at the top of the brick steps on the left side of the building opened first. A petrified man, short, obese, in an undershirt, his trousers held up by suspenders, cautiously walked out into the flood of the searchlight, spreading his hands in front of his face and turning his head away from the blinding beam. "What is it, messieurs?" he cried, his voice tremulous. "I am merely a baker-a good baker-but I know nothing about this street except that the rent is cheap! Is that a crime to the police?"
   "Our concerns are not with you, monsieur," continued the amplified voice.
   "Not with me, you say? You arrive here like an army, frightening my wife and children into thinking it is their last minutes on earth, and yet you say we don't concern you? What kind of reasoning is that? We live among fascists?"
   Hurry up! thought Jason. For God's sake, hurry! Every second is a minute in escape time, an hour for the Jackal!
   The door above the flight of brick steps on the right now opened, and a nun in the full flowing black robe of a religious habit appeared. She stood defiantly in the frame, no fear whatsoever in her almost operatic voice. "How dare you?" she roared. "These are the hours of vespers and you intrude. Better you should be asking forgiveness for your sins than interrupting those who plead with God for theirs!"
   "Nicely said, Sister," intoned the unimpressed police officer over the loudspeaker. "But we have other information and we respectfully insist on searching your house. If you refuse, we shall disrespectfully carry out our orders."
   "We are the Magdalen Sisters of Charity!" exclaimed the nun. "These are the sacrosanct quarters of women devoted to Christ!"
   "We respect your position, Sister, but we are still coming inside. If what you say is so, I'm sure the authorities will make a generous contribution to your cause."
   You're wasting time! screamed Bourne to himself. He's getting away!
   "Then may your souls be damned for transgression, but come ahead and invade this holy ground!"
   "Really, Sister?" asked another official over the loudspeaker. "I don't believe there's anything in the canons that gives you the right to condemn souls to hell on such a flimsy excuse. ... Go ahead, Monsieur Inspector. Under the habit, you may find lingerie more suited to the Faubourg."
   He knew that voice! It was Bernardine! What had happened? Was Bernardine no friend after all? Was it all an act, the smooth talk of a traitor? If so, there would be another death that night!
   The black-uniformed squad of antiterrorists, their automatic weapons bolted into firing mode, raced to the base of the brick steps as the gendarmes blocked off the boulevard Lefebvre, north and south, while the red and blue lights of the patrol cars incessantly blinked their bright warnings to all beyond the area: Stay away.
   "May I go inside?" screamed the baker. No one replied, so the obese man ran through his door clutching his trousers.
   An official in civilian clothes, the obvious leader of the assault, joined his invading unit on the pavement below the steps. With a nod of his head, he and his men raced up the brick staircase through the door held open by the defiant nun.
   Jason held his place at the edge of the building, his body pressed against the stone, the sweat pouring from his hairline and his neck, his eyes on the incomprehensible scene being played out on the Lefebvre. He knew the who now, but why? Was it true? Was the man most trusted by Alex Conklin and himself in reality another pair of eyes and ears for the Jackal? Christ, he did not want to believe it!
   Twelve minutes passed, and with the reemergence of Paris's version of a SWAT team and its leader, several members bowing and kissing the hand of the real or would-be abbess, Bourne understood that his and Conklin's instincts had been on true course.
   "Bernardine!" screamed the official approaching the first patrol car. "You are finished! Out! Never are you to talk to the lowest recruit in the Deuxième, even the man who cleans the toilets! You are ostracized! ... If I had my way, you'd be shot! ... International murder in the boulevard Lefebvre! A friend of the Bureau! An agent we must protect! ... A fucking nunnery, you miserable son of a bitch! Shit! A nunnery! ... Get out of my car, you smelly pig. Get out before a weapon goes off by mistake and your stomach's on the street, where it belongs!"
   Bernardine lurched out of the patrol car, his old unsteady legs barely able to maintain balance, twice falling into the street. Jason waited, wanting to rush to his friend, but knowing he had to wait. The patrol cars and the van raced away; still Bourne had to wait, his eyes alternately watching Bernardine and the front entrance of the Jackal's house. And it was the Jackal's house, the nun proved it. Carlos could never let go of his lost faith; he consistently used it as a viable cover, but it was much more than that. Much more.
   Bernardine staggered into the shadows of a long-abandoned storefront across from the house on the boulevard Lefebvre. Jason breached the corner and ran down the pavement, racing into the recess and grabbing the Deuxième veteran as he leaned against a long glass window, breathing heavily.
   "For God's sake, what happened?" cried Bourne, supporting Bernardine by both shoulders.
   "Easy, mon ami," choked Bernardine. "The pig I sat next to-a politician, no doubt, looking for an issue-punched me in the chest before he threw me out of the car. ... I told you, I don't know all the new people who attach themselves to the Bureau these days. You have the same problems in America, so, please, do not give me a lecture."
   "It's the last thing I'm about to do. ... This is the house, Bernardine. Right here, right in front of us!"
   "This is also a trap."
   "What?"
   "Alex and I confirmed it. The telephone numbers were different. I gather you did not make your call to Carlos, as he instructed you to."
   "No. I had the address and I wanted him stretched. What's the difference? This is the house!"
   "Oh, this is where your Mr. Simon was to go, and if he was truly Mr. Simon, he would be taken to another rendezvous. But if he was not Monsieur Simon but someone else, then he would be shot-proof-another corpse in search of the Jackal."
   "You're wrong!" insisted Jason, shaking his head and speaking quietly, rapidly. "This may be a detour, but Carlos is still on the switch. He's not going to allow anyone to waste me but himself. That's his commandment."
   "As yours is regarding him?"
   "Yes. I have a family; he has a borderline legend. Mine is complete for me, but his is a vacuum-without any real meaning for him any longer. He's gone as far as he can go. The only way he can go further is to move into my territory-David Webb's territory-and eliminate Jason Bourne."
   "Webb? David Webb? Who in the name of almighty God is that?"
   "Me," replied Bourne, smiling forlornly and leaning beside Bernardine against the window. "It's nuts, isn't it?"
   "Nuts!" cried the former Deuxième. "It is fou! Insane, not to be believed!"
   "Believe it."
   "You are a family man with children and you do this work?"
   "Alex never told you?"
   "If he did so, I passed it off as a cover-one goes along with anything." Shaking his head, the older man looked up at his taller companion. "You really have a family whom you do not wish to escape from?"
   "On the contrary, I want to get back to them as soon as I can. They're the only people on earth I really care about."
   "But you are Jason Bourne, the killer Chameleon! The deepest recesses of the criminal world tremble at your name!"
   "Oh, come on, that's a bit much, even from you."
   "Not for an instant! You are Bourne, second only to the Jackal-"
   "No!" shouted the suddenly forgotten David Webb. "He's no match for me! I'll take him! I'll kill him!"
   "Very well, very well, mon ami," said Bernardine calmly, reassuringly, staring at the man he could not understand. "What do you want me to do?"
   Jason Bourne turned and breathed heavily against the glass window for several moments-and then through the mists of indecision the Chameleon's strategy became clear. He swung around and looked across the dark street at the stone building on the right. "The police are gone," he said quietly.
   "Of course, I realize that."
   "Did you also realize that no one from the other two buildings came outside? Yet there are lights on in a number of the windows."
   "I was preoccupied, what can I say? I did not notice." Bernardine raised his eyebrows in sudden recollection. "But there were faces at the windows, several faces, I saw them."
   "Yet no one came outside."
   "Very understandable. The police ... men with weapons racing around. Best to barricade oneself, no?"
   "Even after the police and the weapons and the patrol cars have left? They all just go back to their television sets as if nothing had happened? No one comes out to check with the neighbors? That's not natural, François; it's not even unnaturally natural. It's been orchestrated."
   "What do you mean? How?"
   "One man walks out on the porch and shouts into a searchlight. Attention is drawn to him and precious seconds of a minute's warning evaporate. Then a nun emerges on the other side draping herself in holy indignation-more seconds lost, more hours for Carlos. The assault's mounted and the Deuxième comes up with zero. ... And when it's all over, everything's back to normal-an abnormal normalcy. A job was done according to a predesigned plan, so there's no call for really normal curiosity-no gathering in the street, no excitement, not even a collective postcrisis indignation. Simply people inside undoubtedly checking with one another. Doesn't it all tell you something?"
   Bernardine nodded. "A prearranged strategy carried out by professionals," said the veteran field officer.
   "That's what I think, too."
   "It's what you saw and I did not," countered Bernardine. "Stop being kind, Jason. I've been too long away from the cold. Too soft, too old, too unimaginative."
   "So have I," said Bourne. "It's just that the stakes are so high for me that I have to force myself into thinking like a man I wanted to forget."
   "This is Monsieur Webb speaking?"
   "I guess it is."
   "So where does that leave us?"
   "With an irate baker and an angry nun, and if they prove to be ciphers, several faces in various windows. At this juncture the pickings are ours but that won't last long, I doubt through the morning."
   "I beg your pardon?"
   "Carlos will close up shop here and he'll do it quickly. He hasn't got a choice now. Someone in his Praetorian guard gave someone else the location of his Paris headquarters, and you can bet your pension-if you've still got one-that he's climbing the walls trying to figure out who betrayed him-"
   "Get back!" cried Bernardine, interrupting and grabbing Jason by the cloth of his black jacket, yanking him into the farthest recess of the dark storefront. "Get out of sight! Flat on the pavement!"
   Both men threw themselves down, lying prone on the broken concrete, Bourne's face against the short wall below the glass, his head angled to see the street. A second dark van appeared from the right, but it was not police equipment. Instead, it was shinier and smaller, somehow thicker, lower to the ground and more powerful. The one glaring, blinding similarity it had to the police van was the searchlight. ... No, not one, but two searchlights, one on either side of the windshield, both beams swinging back and forth scanning the vehicle's flanks. Jason reached for the weapon in his belt-the gun he had borrowed from Bernardine-knowing that his companion already had his backup automatic out of his pocket. The beam of the left searchlight shot over their bodies as Bourne whispered, "Good work, but how did you spot it?"
   "The moving reflections of the lamps on the side windows," replied old François. "I thought for a moment it was my former colleague returning to finish the job he had contemplated. Namely, my stomach in the street. ... My God, look!"
   The van swept past the first two buildings, then suddenly swerved into the curb and stopped in front of the last structure, nearly two hundred feet from the storefront, the building farthest from the Jackal's telephone. The instant the vehicle came to a halt the rear door opened and four men jumped out, automatic weapons in their hands, two running to the street side, one racing down the pavement to the front, the last guard standing menacingly by the open doors, his MAC-10 ready to fire. A dull wash of yellow light appeared at the top of the brick steps; the door had been opened and a man in a black raincoat came outside. He stood for a moment looking up and down the boulevard Lefebvre.
   "Is that him?" whispered Francois.
   "No, not unless he's wearing high heels and a wig," answered Jason, reaching into his jacket pocket. "I'll know him when I see him-because I see him every day of my life!" Bourne took out one of the grenades he had also borrowed from Bernardine. He checked the release, laying down his gun and gripping the pockmarked steel oval, tugging at the pin to make certain it was free of corrosion.
   "What the hell do you think you're doing?" asked the old Deuxième veteran.
   "That man up there is a decoy," replied Jason, his soft voice suspended in a cold monotone. "In moments another will take his place, run down the steps and get into the van, either in the front seat or through the rear doors-I hope the latter, but it won't make much difference."
   "You're mad! You'll be killed! What good is a corpse to that family of yours?"
   "You're not thinking, François. The guards will run back and climb up through the rear doors because there's no room in front. There's a lot of difference between climbing into a truck and jumping out of it. For starters, it's a slower sequence. ... By the time the last man gets in and reaches out to close those wide doors, I'll have a primed grenade inside that van. ... And I have no intention of becoming a corpse. Stay here!"
   Before Bernardine could object further, Medusa's Delta crawled out into the dark boulevard, dark but for the harsh stationary beams of the searchlights, which were now angled on the flanks, thus actually enhancing Bourne's concealment. The hot white light around the vehicle obscured the darkness beyond; his only extreme risk was the guard posted by the open doors. Hugging the shadows of the successive storefronts as though he were threading his way through the high grass of the Mekong Delta toward a floodlit prisoner compound, Jason crept slowly forward with each wayward glance of the rear guard, his eyes darting continuously up to the man by the door above the brick steps.
   Suddenly another figure emerged; it was a woman carrying a small suitcase in one hand, a large purse in the other. She spoke to the man in the black raincoat as the guard's attention was drawn to both of them. Bourne scrambled, his elbows and knees silently pounding the hard pavement, until he reached that point nearest the van where he could observe the scene on the staircase with minimum risk of being spotted. He was relieved to see that the two guards in the street continuously winced and blinked under the beam of the searchlight. His status was as clean as it could be under the tenuous circumstances. Everything now was timing, precision, and all the expertise he could summon from times too often unremembered or too vague or too long ago. He had to remember now; instinct had to propel him through his personal mists. Now. The end of the nightmare was at hand.
   It was happening! Suddenly there was furious activity at the door as a third figure came rushing out, joining the other two. The man was shorter than his male colleague, wearing a beret and carrying a briefcase. He obviously issued orders that included the rear guard, who ran up to the pavement as the new arrival hurled his briefcase down over the brick steps. The guard instantly clutched his weapon under his left arm and effortlessly caught the leather missile in midair.
   "Allez-vous-en. Nous partons! Vite!" shouted the second man, gesturing for the other two on the brick steps to precede him down to the van. They did so, the man in the raincoat joining the guard at' the rear doors, the woman accompanying the one who gave the orders. ... The Jackal? Was it Carlos? Was it?
   Bourne desperately wanted to believe that it was-therefore, it was! The sound of the vehicle's curbside door slamming shut was followed rapidly by the gunning of the vehicle's powerful engine; both were a signal. The three other guards raced from their posts to the rear doors of the van. One by one they climbed up inside after the man in the black raincoat, their legs stretched, arms bracing shoulders, curved hands gripping the two metal frames that with instant muscular strain propelled them inside as their weapons were thrown in front of them. Then a pair of hands reached out for the interior door handles-
   Now! Bourne pulled the pin of the grenade and lurched to his feet, running as he had never run in his life toward the swinging rear doors of the van. He dived, twisting his body in flight, landing on his back as he gripped the left panel and threw the grenade inside, the bomb's release in his hand. Six seconds and it would detonate. Jason got to his knees, arms extended, and crashed the doors shut. A fusillade of gunfire erupted. But it was an unintended miracle-as the Jackal's van was bulletproof, it was also impervious to bullets shot from within! There were no penetrations of the steel, only thuds and the screaming whistles of ricochets ... and the screams of the wounded inside.
   The glistening vehicle shot forward on the boulevard Lefebvre as Bourne sprang to a crouch and raced toward the deserted storefronts on the east side of the street. He was nearly across the wide avenue when the impossible happened. The impossible!
   The Jackal's van blew up, the explosion firing the dark Paris sky, and the moment it happened a brown limousine screeched around the nearest corner, the windows open, men in the black spaces, weapons in their grips, spraying the entire area with thunderous, indiscriminate fire. Jason lunged into the nearest recess, curling up into a fetal position in the shadows, accepting the fact-not in fear but in fury-that it might well be his last moments of life. He had failed. Failed Marie and his children! ... But not this way. He spun off the concrete, the weapon in his hand. He would kill, kill! That was the way of Jason Bourne.
   Then the incredible happened. The incredible. A siren? The police? The brown limousine shot forward, skirting the flaming wreck of the Jackal's van and disappeared into the dark streets as a patrol car raced out of the opposing darkness, its siren screaming, the tires screeching as it skidded to a stop only yards from the flames of the demolished vehicle. Nothing made sense! thought Jason. Where before there had been five patrol cars, only one had returned. Why? And even that question was superfluous. Carlos had mounted a strategy employing not one but seven, conceivably eight, decoys, all expendable, all led to their terrible death by the consummate self-protector. The Jackal had sprung himself from the trap that had been reversed by his hated quarry, Delta, the product of Medusa, a creation of American intelligence. Once again, the assassin had outthought him, but he had not killed him. There would be another day, another night.
   "Bernardine!" screamed the Deuxième official who less than thirty minutes ago had officially disowned his colleague. Leaping out of the patrol car, the man shouted again. "Bernardine! Where are you? ... My God, where are you? I came back, old friend, for I could not leave you! My God, you were right, I see that now for myself! Oh, Christ, tell me you're alive! Answer me!"
   "Another is dead," came the reply from Bernardine as his gaunt figure walked slowly, with difficulty, out of the storefront two hundred feet north of Bourne. "I tried to tell you but you would not listen-"
   "I was perhaps too hasty!" roared the official, running to the old man and embracing him as the others in the patrol car, their arms crossed in front of their faces, surrounded the burning van but at a considerable distance. "I've radioed for our people to return!" added the official. "You must believe me, old friend, I came back because I couldn't leave you in anger, not my old comrade. ... I had no idea that pig from the newspaper actually assaulted you, struck you. He told me and I threw him out! ... I came back for you, you see that, don't you? But, my God, I never expected anything like this!"
   "It's horrible," said the Deuxième veteran, while cautiously, his eyes straying rapidly up and down the boulevard, he surveyed the area. He specifically noted the many frightened, intense faces in the windows of the three stone buildings. The scenario had blown apart with the van's explosion and the disappearance of the brown limousine. The minions were without their leader and filled with anxiety. "It's not entirely your error alone-my old comrade," he continued, a note of apology in his voice. "I had the wrong building."
   "Ah ha," cried the Deuxième associate, relishing a minor triumph of self-vindication. "The wrong building? That is indeed a mistake of consequence, eh, François?"
   "The consequences might have been far less tragic had you not abandoned me so hastily, as you so aptly phrased it. Instead of listening to a man with my vast experience, you ordered me out of your car only to have me witness the horror moments after you fled."
   "We followed your orders! We searched the building-the wrong building!"
   "Had you remained, if only for a brief conference, this might have been avoided and a friend might be alive. I shall have to include that judgment in my report-"
   "Please, old friend," broke in the associate. "Let us reason together for the good of the Bureau-" The interruption now came with the shrill appearance of a fire truck. Bernardine held up his hand and led his protesting former comrade across the boulevard, ostensibly to get out of the way of the firemen, more purposefully to be within earshot of Jason Bourne. "When our people arrive," went on the associate of the Deuxième, his voice rising with authority, "we shall empty the buildings and detain every resident for thorough interrogation!"
   "My God," exclaimed Bernardine, "don't add asininity to incompetence!"
   "What?"
   "The limousine, the brown limousine-surely you saw it."
   "Yes, of course. The driver said it raced away."
   "That's all he told you?"
   "Well, the truck was in flames and there was so much confusion radioing for personnel-"
   "Look at the shattered glass!" commanded François, pointing at the storefronts away from the recess where Bourne was hiding. "Look at the pits on the pavement and in the street. Gun fire, my old comrade. Those involved escaped believing they had killed me! ... Say nothing, do nothing. Leave these people alone."
   "You are incomprehensible-"
   "And you are a fool. If for any reason whatsoever there is the slightest possibility that even one of those killers is ordered to return here, there can be no impediments."
   "Now you are inscrutable."
   "Not at all," protested Bernardine as the firemen hosed down the flames of the van, their efforts augmented by giant extinguishers. "Send your people into each building, inquiring if everything is all right, explaining that the authorities have determined the terrible events on the boulevard were criminally oriented. The crisis has passed; there is no further alarm."
   "But is that true?"
   "It's what we want them to believe." An ambulance stormed into the street followed by two additional patrol cars, all the sirens at maximum volume. From the rue d'Alésia, apartment dwellers had gathered at both corners, many in hastily pulled-on street attire-trousers and undershirts-while others were in night clothes-frayed bathrobes and worn slippers. Noting that the Jackal's van was now a smoldering mass of twisted steel and shattered glass, Bernardine continued: "Give the crowds time to satisfy their morbid viewing, then send men to disperse them. In an hour or so, when the rubble is under control and the bodies carted away, proclaim loudly to your police detachment that the emergency is over, ordering all but one man back to the precinct. That man is to remain here on duty until the debris is cleared from the boulevard. He is also to be instructed not to interfere with anyone leaving the buildings, is that clear?"
   "Not for a moment. You said that someone might be hiding-"
   "I know what I said," pressed the former Deuxième consultant. "It changes nothing."
   "You will stay here, then?"
   "Yes. I will move slowly, inconspicuously, around the area."
   "I see. ... What about the police report? And my report?"
   "Use some of the truth, not all of it, of course. Word was passed to you-informer's name withheld-that an act of violence related to the Bureau's narcotics division was to take place on the boulevard Lefebvre at precisely this hour. You commandeered a police contingent and found nothing, but shortly thereafter your highly professional instincts sent you back beyond the time span, unfortunately too late to stop the carnage."
   "I might even be commended," said the associate, suddenly frowning, wary. "And your report?" he asked quietly.
   "We'll see if one is necessary, won't we?" replied the newly reinstated Deuxième consultant.
   The medical team wrapped the bodies of the victims and placed them in the ambulance as a wrecker hoisted what was left of the destroyed vehicle into the huge attached dumpster. The crew swept the street, several remarking that they should not sweep too thoroughly or no one would recognize the Lefebvre. A quarter of an hour later the job was finished; the wrecker departed, the lone patrolman joining the crew to be dropped off at the nearest police phone several blocks away. It was well past four o'clock in the morning, and soon the dawn would light up the sky over Paris, preceding the boisterous human carnival below. Now, however, the only signs of life on the boulevard Lefebvre were five lighted windows in the row of stone buildings controlled by Carlos the Jackal. Inside those rooms were men and women for whom sleep was not permitted. They had work to do for their monseigneur.
   Bourne sat on the pavement, his legs outstretched, his back against the inside wall of a storefront across from the building where the frightened yet argumentative baker and the indignant nun had confronted the police. Bernardine was in a similar recess several hundred feet away, opposite the first building where the Jackal's van had stopped for its condemned cargo. Their agreement was firm: Jason would follow and take by force whoever left first from any building; the old Deuxième veteran would follow whoever left second, ascertain his or her destination, but make no contact. Bourne's judgment was that either the baker or the nun would be the assassin's messenger, so he had selected the north end of the row of stone houses.
   He was partially right, but he had not anticipated an embarrassment of personnel and conveyances. At 5:17, two bicycles ridden by nuns in full habits and white hats wheeled up from the south side of the boulevard, ringing the muted bells on their handlebars as they stopped in front of the house that was supposedly the quarters of the Magdalen Sisters of Charity. The door opened and three additional nuns, each carrying a bicycle, walked out and down the brick steps to join their charitable sisters. They discreetly mounted their saddles and the procession started up the street; the one consoling fact for Jason was that Carlos's indignant nun took up the single rear position. Not knowing how it would happen, knowing only that it would happen, Bourne lurched out of the storefront and ran across the dark boulevard. As he reached the shadows of the deserted lot adjacent to the Jackal's house, another door opened. He crouched, watching the overweight irate baker waddle rapidly down his brick steps and head south. Bernardine had his work cut out for him, too, thought Jason as he got to his feet and ran after his procession of cycling nuns.
   Paris traffic is an endless enigma regardless of the hour of day or night. It also provides palpable excuses for anyone wishing to be early or late, or having arrived at the right destination or the wrong one. In a phrase, Parisians behind a steering wheel embody the last civilized vestiges of lethal abandon-possibly outdone by their counterparts in Rome or Athens. And so it was for the Magdalen Sisters of Charity, especially for the officious superior hen on the single rear point. At an intersection of the rue Lecourbe in Montparnasse, a congestion of produce trucks prevented her from keeping up with her religious colleagues. Benignly she waved them on and abruptly turned into a narrow side street, suddenly pedaling faster than before. Bourne, his wound from Tranquility Isle now pulsating throughout his neck, did not increase his pace; he did not have to. The white-lettered blue sign on the building fronting the street read IMPASSE, a dead end; there was no other way out.
   He found the bicycle chained to an extinguished street lamp and waited in the darkness of a doorway no more than fifteen feet away. He raised his hand and touched the warm moistness of the bandage around his neck; the bleeding was slight. With luck, no more than one suture had burst. ... Oh, Christ, his legs were tired-no, "tired" was inadequate. They ached with the pain that came with unused and abused muscles; the rhythmic strides of jogging, even running, were no preparation for lurching or weaving, or for violently sudden stops and starts. He leaned against the stone, breathing heavily, his eyes on the bicycle, trying to suppress a thought that kept recurring with infuriating regularity: only a few short years ago, he would never have noticed the discomfort in his legs. There would have been none.
   The sound of an unlatched bolt broke the stillness of the predawn narrow street, followed rapidly by the grating noise of a heavy door being opened. It was the entrance to the flat in front of the chained bicycle. His back against the wall, Jason removed the gun from his belt and watched the woman in the nun's habit rush to the lamppost. She fumbled with a key in the dim light, awkwardly trying to insert it into the base of the lock. Bourne stepped out on the pavement and walked swiftly, silently forward.
   "You'll be late for early Mass," he said.
   The woman spun around, the key flying into the street, her black cloth snapping in the turn as she plunged her right hand between the folds of her habit. Jason lurched, gripping her arm with his left hand and tearing off the large white hat with his right. At the sight of the exposed face in front of him, he gasped.
   "My God," he whispered. "It's you!"

27
   "I know you!" cried Bourne. "Paris ... years ago ... your name is Lavier ... Jacqueline Lavier. You had one of those dress shops ... Les Classiques-St.-Honoré-Carlos's drop in the Faubourg! I found you in a confessional booth in Neuilly-sur-Seine. I thought you were dead." The woman's sharp, creased, middle-aged fade was contorted in frenzy. She tried to twist out of his grip, but Jason stepped sideways as she pivoted, yanking her away in a sweeping circular motion, crashing her against the wall, pinning her, his left forearm across her throat. "But you weren't dead. You were part of the trap that ended at the Louvre, blew apart at the Louvre! ... By Christ, you're coming with me. Men died in that trap-Frenchmen died-and I couldn't stay around and tell them how it happened or who was responsible. ... In my country, you kill a cop, it doesn't go off the books. It's no different over here; and when it's cops, they don't stop looking. Oh, they'll remember the Louvre, they'll remember their men!"
   "You're wrong!" choked the woman, her wide green eyes bulging. "I'm not who you think I am-"
   "You're Lavier! Queen of the Faubourg, sole contact to the Jackal's woman, the general's wife. Don't tell me I'm wrong ... I followed the two of you out to Neuilly-to that church with the bells ringing and priests everywhere-one of them Carlos! Moments later his whore came back out, but you didn't. She left in a hurry, so I ran inside and described you to an old priest-if he was a priest-and he told me you were in the second confessional from the left. I walked over and pulled the curtain and there you were. Dead. I thought you'd just been killed and everything was happening so fast. Carlos had to be there! He was within my reach, my gun-or maybe I was within his. I raced around like a maniac and finally I saw him! Out in the street in his priestly black clothes-I saw him, I knew it was him because he saw me and started to run through the traffic. And then I lost him, I lost him! ... But I had a card to play. You. I passed the word-Lavier's dead. ... It was just what I was supposed to do, wasn't it? Wasn't it?"
   "I tell you again, you are wrong!" The woman no longer struggled; it was pointless. Instead, she remained rigid against the wall, no part of her body moving, as if by doing so she might be permitted to speak. "Will you listen to me?" she asked with difficulty, Jason's forearm still pressed against her throat.
   "Forget it, lady," answered Bourne. "You're going out of here limp-a Sister of Charity being helped, not assaulted, by a stranger. You're about to have a fainting spell. At your age it's a fairly common occurrence, isn't it?"
   "Wait."
   "Too late."
   "We must talk!"
   "We will." Releasing his arm, Jason instantly crashed both his hands simultaneously into the woman's shoulder blades where the tendons weave into the neck muscles. She collapsed; he caught her in the fall and carried her out of the narrow street as an adoring supplicant might a religious social worker. The dawn light was beginning to fill the sky, and several early risers, one a young jogger in shorts, converged on the man carrying the nun. "She's been with my wife and sick children for nearly two days without sleep!" pleaded the Chameleon in street French. "Will someone please find me a taxi so I can take her back to her convent in the ninth arrondissement?"
   "I shall!" roared the young runner. "There's an all-night stand on the rue de Sèvres, and I'm very fast!"
   "You are a gift, monsieur," said Jason, appreciating but instantly disliking the all too confident, all too young jogger.
   Six minutes later the taxi arrived, the youth inside. "I told the driver you have money," he said, climbing out. "I trust it's so."
   "Of course. And thanks."
   "Tell the sister what I did," added the young man in running shorts, helping Bourne gently insert the unconscious woman into the back of the taxi. "I'll need all the help I can get when my time comes."
   "I trust that's not imminent," said Jason, trying to return the youth's grin.
   "Not likely! I represent my firm in the marathon." The overgrown child began running in place.
   "Thanks again. I hope you win the next one."
   "Tell the sister to pray for me!" cried the athlete, racing away.
   "The Bois de Boulogne," said Bourne, closing the door and addressing the driver.
   "The Bois? That ventilating nut told me it was an emergency! You had to get the nun to a hospital."
   "She drank too much wine, what can I tell you?"
   "The Bois de Boulogne," said the driver, nodding his head. "Let her walk it off. I have a second cousin in the Lyons convent. She gets out for a week she's soused to the temples. Who can blame her?"
   The bench on the graveled path of the Bois progressively received the warm rays of the early sun as the middle-aged woman in the religious habit began shaking her head. "How are you doing, Sister?" asked Jason, sitting beside his prisoner.
   "I believe I was struck by an army tank," replied the woman, blinking and opening her mouth to swallow air. "At least a tank."
   "Which I suspect you know more about than a welfare wagon from the Magdalen Sisters of Charity."
   "Quite so," agreed the woman.
   "Don't bother to look for your gun," said Bourne. "I removed it from the very expensive belt under your habit."
   "I'm glad you recognized the value. It's part of what we must talk about. ... Since I am not in a police station, I assume you've granted me my request to talk."
   "Only if what you say suits my purpose, I assume you understand that."
   "But it must, you see. Suit your purpose, as you say. I've failed. I've been taken. I'm not where I should be, and whatever the time is, the light tells me I'm too late for excuses. Also, my bicycle has either disappeared or is still chained to the lamppost."
   "I didn't take it."
   "Then I'm a dead woman. And if it's gone I'm just as dead, don't you see?"
   "Because you've disappeared? Not where you're supposed to be?"
   "Of course."
   "You're Lavier!"
   "That's true. I'm Lavier. But I'm not the woman you knew. You knew my sister Jacqueline-I am Dominique Lavier. We were close in age and since we were children strongly resembled each other. But you are not wrong about Neuilly-sur-Seine or what you saw there. My sister was killed because she broke a cardinal rule, committed a mortal sin, if you like. She panicked and led you to Carlos's woman, his most cherished and useful secret."
   "Me? ... You know who I am?"
   "All Paris-the Jackal's Paris-knows who you are, Monsieur Bourne. Not by sight, I grant you, but they know you are here and they know you're tracking Carlos."
   "And you're part of that Paris?"
   "I am."
   "Good Christ, lady, he killed your sister!"
   "I'm aware of that."
   "Still you work for him?"
   "There are times when a person's choices are considerably reduced. Say, to live or to die. Until six years ago when Les Classiques changed ownership, it was vital to the monseigneur. I took Jacqui's place-"
   "Just like that?"
   "It wasn't difficult. I was younger, and more to the point I looked younger." The lines in the middle-aged Lavier's face cracked with a brief pensive smile. "My sister always said it came with living on the Mediterranean. ... At any rate, cosmetic surgery is commonplace in the world of haute couture. Jacqui supposedly went to Switzerland for a face-lift ... and I returned to Paris after eight weeks of preparation."
   "How could you? Knowing what you knew, how the hell could you?"
   "I did not know earlier what I learned later, by which time it was irrelevant. By then I had the choice I just mentioned. To live or to die."
   "It never occurred to you to go to the police or the Sûreté?"
   "Regarding Carlos?" The woman looked at Bourne as if rebuking a foolish child. "As the British say in Cap Ferrat, surely you jest."
   "So you blithely went into the killing game?"
   "Not consciously. I was gradually led into it, my education slow, piecemeal. ... In the beginning I was told Jacqueline had died in a boating accident with her lover of the month and that I would be enormously well paid to carry on in her place. Les Classiques was far more than a grand salon-"
   "Far more," agreed Jason, interrupting; "It was the drop for France's most highly classified military and intelligence secrets funneled to the Jackal by his woman, a celebrated general's wife."
   "I was not aware of that until long after the general killed her. Villiers was his name, I believe."
   "It was." Jason looked across the path at the still dark waters of a pond, white lilies floating in clusters. Images came back to him. "I'm the one who found him, found them. Villiers was in a high-backed chair, a gun in his hand, his wife lying on the bed, naked, bleeding, dead. He was going to kill himself. It was a proper execution for a traitor, he said, for his devotion to his wife had blinded his judgment and in that blindness he had betrayed his beloved France. ... I convinced him there was another way; it almost worked-thirteen years ago. In a strange house on Seventy-first Street in New York."
   "I don't know what happened in New York, but General Villiers left instructions that after his death what happened in Paris was to be made part of the public record. When he died and the truth was known, it was said that Carlos went mad with fury, killing several high-ranking military commanders simply because they were generals."
   "It's all an old story," interrupted Bourne sharply. "This is now, thirteen years later. What happens now?"
   "I don't know, monsieur. My choices are zero, aren't they? One or the other of you will kill me, I suppose."
   "Maybe not. Help me take him and you're free of both of us. You can go back to the Mediterranean and live in peace. You won't even have to disappear-you merely return to wherever it is after a number of profitable years in Paris."
   "Disappear?" asked Lavier, studying the haggard face of her captor. "As in the word 'vanish'?"
   "No need for that. Carlos can't reach you because he'll be dead."
   "Yes, I understand that part. It's the disappearance that interests me along with the 'profitable' years. Does this profit come from you?"
   "Yes."
   "I see. ... Is that what you offered Santos? A profitable disappearance?"
   It was as if the words were hard flesh and had slapped him across the face. Jason looked at his prisoner. "So it was Santos, after all," he said softly. "The Lefebvre was a trap. Christ, he's good."
   "He's dead, Le Coeur du Soldat cleaned out and closed down."
   "What?" Stunned, Bourne again stared at the Lavier woman. "That was his reward for cornering me?"
   "No, for betraying Carlos."
   "I don't understand."
   "The monseigneur has eyes everywhere, I'm sure that's no surprise to you. Santos, the total recluse, was observed sending several heavy boxes out with his main food supplier, and yester day morning he did not clip and water his precious garden, a summer ritual as predictable as the sun. A man was sent to the supplier's warehouse and opened the boxes-"
   "Books," broke in Jason quietly.
   "Placed in storage until further instructions," completed Dominique Lavier. "Santos's departure was to be swift and secret."
   "And Carlos knew there was no one in Moscow giving out a telephone number."
   "I beg your pardon?"
   "Nothing. ... What kind of man was Santos?"
   "I never knew him, never even saw him. I've only heard the downstairs rumors, which weren't many."
   "I haven't time for many. What were they?"
   "Apparently he was a very large man-"
   "I know that," interrupted Jason impatiently. "And from the books we both know that he was well read, probably well educated, if his speech was indicative. Where did he come from and why did he work for the Jackal?"
   "They say he was Cuban and fought in Fidel's revolution, that he was a deep thinker, as well as a law student with Castro, and once a great athlete. Then, of course, as in all revolutions, the internal strife sours the victories-at least that's what my old friends from the May Day barricades tell me."
   "Translation, please?"
   "Fidel was jealous of the leaders of certain cadres, especially Che Guevara and the man you knew as Santos. Where Castro was larger than life, those two were larger than he was, and Fidel could not tolerate the competition. Che was sent on a mission that ended his life, and trumped up counterrevolutionary charges were brought against Santos. He was within an hour of being executed when Carlos and his men broke into the prison and spirited him away."
   "Spirited? Dressed as priests, no doubt."
   "I have no doubts. The Church with all its medieval lunacies once held sway over Cuba."
   "You sound bitter."
   "I'm a woman, the Pontiff is not; he's merely medieval."
   "Judgment decreed. ... So Santos joined forces with Carlos, two disillusioned Marxists in search of their personal cause-or maybe their own personal Hollywood."
   "That's beyond me, monsieur, but if I vaguely understand you, the fantasy belongs to the brilliant Carlos; the bitter disillusion was Santos's fate. He owed his life to the Jackal, so why not give it? What was left for him? ... Until you came along."
   "That's all I need. Thanks. I just wanted a few gaps filled in."
   "Gaps?"
   "Things I didn't know."
   "What do we do now, Monsieur Bourne? Wasn't that your original question?"
   "What do you want to do, Madame Lavier?"
   "I know I don't want to die. And I am not Madame Lavier in the marital sense. The restrictions never appealed to me and the benefits seemed unnecessary. For years I was a high-priced call girl in Monte Carlo, Nice and Cap Ferrat until my looks and my body deserted me. Still, I once had friends from the old days, intermittent lovers who took care of me for old times' sake. Most are dead now, a pity, really."
   "I thought you said you were enormously well paid for assuming your sister's identity."
   "Oh, I was and to a degree I still am, for I'm still valuable. I move among the elite of Paris, where gossip abounds, and that's often helpful. I have a beautiful flat on the avenue Montaigne. Antiques, fine paintings, servants, charge accounts-everything a woman once in high fashion should be expected to have for the circles she still travels in: And money. Every month my bank receives eighty thousand francs from Geneva-somewhat more than enough for me to pay the bills. For, you see, I have to pay them, no one else can do so."
   "So then you've got money."
   "No, monsieur. I have a life-style, not money. That's the way of the Jackal. Except for the old men, he pays only for what he gets in terms of immediate service. If the money from Geneva does not arrive at my bank on the tenth of every month, I'd be thrown out in thirty days. But then if Carlos decided to get rid of me, there would be no need for Geneva. I'd be finished-as I am no doubt finished now. If I returned to my flat in the Montaigne this morning, I'd never come out ... as my sister never came out of that church in Neuilly-sur-Seine. At least not alive."
   "You're convinced of that?"
   "Of course. The stop where I chained the bicycle was made to receive instructions from one of the old men. The orders were precise and to be precisely followed. A woman I know would meet me in twenty minutes at a bakery in Saint-Germain where we were to exchange clothes. She was to proceed to the Magdalen mission and I was to meet a courier from Athens in a room at the Hôtel Trémoille."
   "The Magdalen mission ... ? You mean those women on the bicycles were actually nuns?"
   "Complete with vows of chastity and poverty, monsieur. I am a frequent visiting superior from the convent at Saint-Malo."
   "And the woman at the bakery. Is she-?"
   "She falls from grace now and then, but she's a perfectly splendid administrator."
   "Jesus," mumbled Bourne.
   "He's frequently on their lips. ... Do you see now the hopelessness of my position?"
   "I'm not sure I do."
   "Then I am forced to wonder if you really are the Chameleon. I was not at the bakery. The meeting with the Greek courier never took place. Where was I?"
   "You were delayed. The bicycle chain broke; you got grazed by one of those trucks on the rue Lecourbe. Hell, you got mugged. What's the difference? You were delayed."
   "How long has it been since you rendered me unconscious?"
   Jason looked at his watch, now easily seen in the bright morning sunlight. "Something over an hour-plus, I think; perhaps an hour and a half. Considering how you were dressed, the taxi driver cruised around trying to find a place to park where we could help you to a bench on the path with as little scrutiny as possible. He was well paid for his assistance."
   "An hour and a half?" asked Lavier pointedly.
   "So?"
   "So why didn't I call the bakery or the Hôtel Trémoille?"
   "Complications? ... No, too easily verified," added Bourne, shaking his head.
   "Or?" Lavier locked her large green eyes with his. "Or, monsieur?"
   "The boulevard Lefebvre," replied Jason slowly, softly. "The trap. As I reversed his on me, he reversed mine for him three hours later. Then I broke the strategy and took you."
   "Exactly." The once and former whore of Monte Carlo nodded. "And he cannot know what transpired between us ... therefore, I'm marked for execution. A pawn is removed, for she is merely a pawn. She can tell the authorities nothing of substance; she's never seen the Jackal; she can only repeat the gossip of lowly subordinates."
   "You've never seen him?"
   "I may have, but not to my knowledge. Again, the rumors fly around Paris. This one with swarthy Latin skin, or that one with black eyes and a dark mustache; 'He is really Carlos, you know'-how often have I heard the phrases! But no, no man has ever come up to me and said, 'I am he and I make your life pleasant, you aging elegant prostitute.' I simply report to old men who every now and then convey information that I must have-such as this evening on the boulevard Lefebvre."
   "I see." Bourne got to his feet, stretching his body and looking down at his prisoner on the bench. "I can get you out," he said quietly. "Out of Paris, out of Europe. Beyond Carlos's reach. Do you want that?"
   "As eagerly as Santos did," answered Lavier, her eyes imploring. "I willingly trade my allegiance from him to you."
   "Why?"
   "Because he is old and gray-faced and is no match for you. You offer me life; he offers death."
   "That's a reasonable decision, then," said Jason, a tentative but warm smile on his lips. "Do you have any money? With you, I mean?"
   "Nuns are sworn to poverty, monsieur," replied Dominique Lavier, returning his smile. "Actually, I have several hundred francs. Why?"
   "It's not enough," continued Bourne, reaching into his pocket and taking out his impressive roll of franc notes. "Here's three thousand," he said, handing her the money. "Buy some clothes somewhere-I'm sure you know how-and take a room at the ... the Meurice on the rue de Rivoli."
   "What name should I use?"
   "What suits you?"
   "How about Brielle? A lovely seaside town."
   "Why not? ... Give me ten minutes to get out of here and then leave. I'll see you at the Meurice at noon."
   "With all my heart, Jason Bourne!"
   "Let's forget that name."
   The Chameleon walked out of the Bois de Boulogne to the nearest taxi station. Within minutes an ecstatic cabdriver accepted a hundred francs to remain in place at the end of the three-vehicle line, his passenger slumped in the rear seat waiting to hear the words.
   "The nun comes out, monsieur!" cried the driver. "She enters the first taxi!"
   "Follow it," said Jason, sitting up.
   On the avenue Victor Hugo, Lavier's taxi slowed down and pulled up in front of one of Paris's few exceptions to tradition-an open plastic-domed public telephone. "Stop here," ordered Bourne, who climbed out the instant the driver swung into the curb. Limping, the Chameleon walked swiftly, silently, to the telephone directly behind and unseen by the frantic nun under the plastic dome. He was not seen, but he could hear clearly as he stood several feet behind her.
   "The Meurice!" she shouted into the phone. "The name is Brielle. He'll be there at noon. ... Yes, yes, I'll stop at my flat, change clothes, and be there in an hour." Lavier hung up and turned, gasping at the sight of Jason. "No!" she screamed.
   "Yes, I'm afraid," said Bourne. "Shall we take my taxi or yours? ... 'He's old and gray-faced'-those were your words, Dominique. Pretty goddamned descriptive for someone who never met Carlos."
   A furious Bernardine walked out of the Pont-Royal with the doorman, who had summoned him. "This is preposterous!" he shouted as he approached the taxi. "No, it's not," he amended, looking inside. "It's merely insane."
   "Get in," said Jason on the far side of the woman dressed in the habit of a nun. Francois did so, staring at the black clothes, the white pointed hat and the pale face of the religious female between them. "Meet one of the Jackal's more talented performers," added Bourne. "She could make a fortune in your cinéma-vérité, take my word for it."
   "I'm not a particularly religious man, but I trust you have not made a mistake. ... I did-or should I say we did-with that pig of a baker."
   "Why?"
   "He's a baker, that's all he is! I damn near put a grenade in his ovens, but no one but a French baker could plead the way he did!"
   "It fits," said Jason. "The illogical logic of Carlos-I can't remember who said that, probably me." The taxi made a U-turn and entered the rue du Bac. "We're going to the Meurice," added Bourne.
   "I'm sure there's a reason," stated Bernardine, still looking at the enigmatically passive face of Dominique Lavier. "I mean, this sweet old lady says nothing."
   "I'm not old!" cried the woman vehemently.
   "Of course not, my dear," agreed the Deuxième veteran. "Only more desirable in your mature years."
   "Boy, did you hit it!"
   "Why the Meurice?" asked Bernardine.
   "It's the Jackal's final trap for me," answered Bourne. "Courtesy of our persuasive Magdalen Sister of Charity here. He expects me to be there and I'll be there."
   "I'll call in the Deuxième. Thanks to a frightened bureaucrat, they'll do anything I ask. Don't endanger yourself, my friend."
   "I don't mean to insult you, Francois, but you yourself told me you didn't know all of the people in the Bureau these days. I can't take the chance of a leak. One man could send out an alarm."
   "Let me help." The low soft-spoken voice of Dominique Lavier broke the hum of the outside traffic like the initial burr of a chain saw. "I can help."
   "I listened to your help before, lady, and it was leading me to my own execution. No thanks."
   "That was before, not now. As must be obvious to you, my position now is truly hopeless."
   "Didn't I hear those words recently?"
   "No, you did not. I just added the word 'now.' ... For God's sake, put yourself in my place. I can't pretend to understand, but this ancient boulevardier beside me casually mentions that he'll call in the Deuxième-the Deuxième, Monsieur Bourne! For some that is no less than France's Gestapo! Even if I survived, I'm marked by that infamous branch of the government. I'd no doubt be sent to some horrible penal colony halfway across the world-oh, I've heard the stories of the Deuxième!"
   "Really?" said Bernardine. "I haven't. Sounds positively marvelous. How wonderful."
   "Besides," continued Lavier, looking hard at Jason as she yanked the pointed white hat off her head, a gesture that caused the driver, seeing it in the rearview mirror, to raise his eyebrows. "Without me, without my presence in decidedly different clothing at the Meurice, Carlos won't come near the rue de Rivoli." Bernardine tapped the woman's shoulder, bringing his index finger to his lips and nodding toward the front seat. Dominique quickly added, "The man you wish to confer with will not be there."
   "She's got a point," said Bourne, leaning forward and looking past Lavier at the Deuxième veteran. "She's also got an apartment on the Montaigne, where she's supposed to change clothes, and neither of us can go in with her."
   "That poses a dilemma, doesn't it?" responded Bernardine. "There's no way we can monitor the telephone from outside in the street, is there?"
   "You fools! ... I have no choice but to cooperate with you, and if you can't see that you should be led around by trained dogs! This old, old man here will have my name in the Deuxième files the first chance he gets, and as the notorious Jason Bourne knows if he has even a nodding acquaintance with the Deuxième, several profound questions are raised-once raised by my sister, Jacqueline, incidentally. Who is this Bourne? Is he real or unreal? Is he the assassin of Asia or is he a fraud, a plant? She phoned me herself one night in Nice after too many brandies-a night perhaps you recall, Monsieur le Caméléon-a terribly expensive restaurant outside Paris. You threatened her ... in the name of powerful, unnamed people you threatened her! You demanded that she reveal what she knew about a certain acquaintance of hers-who it was at the time I had no idea-but you frightened her. She said you appeared deranged, that your eyes became glazed and you uttered words in a language she could not understand."
   "I remember," interrupted Bourne icily. "We had dinner and I threatened her and she was frightened. She went to the ladies' room, paid someone to make a phone call, and I had to get out of there."
   "And now the Deuxième is allied with those powerful unnamed people?" Dominique Lavier shook her head repeatedly and lowered her voice. "No, messieurs, I am a survivor and I do not fight against such odds. One knows when to pass the shoe in baccarat."
   After a short period of silence, Bernardine spoke. "What's your address on the avenue Montaigne? I'll give it to the driver, but before I do, understand me, madame. If your words prove false, all the true horrors of the Deuxième will be visited upon you."
   Marie sat at the room-service table in her small suite at the Meurice reading the newspapers. Her attention constantly strayed; concentration was out of the question. Her anxiety had kept her awake after she returned to the hotel shortly past midnight, having made the rounds of five cafés she and David had frequented so many years ago in Paris. Finally by four-something in the morning, exhaustion had short-circuited her tossing and turning; she fell asleep with the bedside lamp switched on, and was awakened by the same light nearly six hours later. It was the longest she had slept since that first night on Tranquility Isle, itself a distant memory now except for the very real pain of not seeing and hearing the children. Don't think about them, it hurts too much. Think about David. ... No, think about Jason Bourne! Where? Concentrate!
   She put down the Paris Tribune and poured herself a third cup of black coffee, glancing over at the French doors that led to a small balcony overlooking the rue de Rivoli. It disturbed her that the once bright morning had turned into a dismal gray day. Soon the rain would come, making her search in the streets even more difficult. Resigned, she sipped her coffee and replaced the elegant cup in the elegant saucer, annoyed that it was not one of the simple pottery mugs favored by David and her in their rustic country kitchen in Maine. Oh, God, would they ever be back there again? Don't think about such things! Concentrate! Out of the question.
   She picked up the Tribune, aimlessly scanning the pages, seeing only isolated words, no sentences or paragraphs, no continuity of thought or meaning, merely words. Then one stood out at the bottom of a meaningless column, a single meaningless line bracketed at the bottom of a meaningless page.
   The word was Memom, followed by a telephone number; and despite the fact that the Tribune was printed in English, the French in her switchable French-thinking brain absently translated the word as Maymohm. She was about to turn the page when a signal from another part of her brain screamed Stop!
   Memom ... mommy-turned around by a child struggling with his earliest attempts at language. Meemom! Jamie-their Jamie! The funny inverted name he had called her for several weeks! David had joked about it while she, frightened, had wondered if their son had dyslexia.
   "He could also just be confused, memom," David had laughed.
   David! She snapped up the page; it was the financial section of the paper, the section she instinctively gravitated to every morning over coffee. David was sending her a message! She pushed back her chair, crashing it to the floor as she grabbed the paper and rushed to the telephone on the desk. Her hands trembling, she dialed the number. There was no answer, and thinking that in her panic she had made an error or had not used the local Paris digit, she dialed again, now slowly, precisely.
   No answer. But it was David, she felt it, she knew it! He had been looking for her at the Trocadéro and now he was using a briefly employed nickname only the two of them would know! My love, my love, I've found you! ... She also knew she could not stay in the confining quarters of the small hotel suite, pacing up and down and dialing every other minute, driving herself crazy with every unanswered ring. When you're stressed out and spinning until you think you'll blow apart, find someplace where you can keep moving without being noticed. Keep moving! That's vital. You can't let your head explode. One of the lessons from Jason Bourne. Her head spinning, Marie dressed more rapidly than she had ever done in her life. She tore out the message from the Tribune and left the oppressive suite, trying not to run to the bank of elevators but needing the crowds of the Paris streets, where she could keep moving without being noticed. From one telephone kiosk to another.
   The ride down to the lobby was both interminable and insufferable, the latter because of an American couple-he laden with camera equipment, she with purple eyelids and a peroxide bouffant apparently set in concrete-who kept complaining that not enough people in Paris, France, spoke English. The elevator doors thankfully opened and Marie walked out rapidly into the crowded Meurice lobby.
   As she crossed the marble floor toward the large glass doors of the ornate filigreed entrance, she suddenly, involuntarily stopped as an elderly man in a dark pin-striped suit gasped, his slender body lurching forward in a heavy leather chair below on her right. The old man stared at her, his thin lips parted in astonishment, his eyes in shock.
   "Marie St. Jacques!" he whispered. "My God, get out of here!"
   "I beg your ... What?"
   The aged Frenchman quickly, with difficulty, rose to his feet, his head subtly, swiftly, jerking in short movements as he scanned the lobby. "You cannot be seen here, Mrs. Webb," he said, his voice still a whisper but no less harsh and commanding. "Don't look at me! Look at your watch. Keep your head down." The Deuxième veteran glanced away, nodding aimlessly at several people in nearby chairs as he continued, his lips barely moving. "Go out the door on the far left, the one used for luggage. Hurry!"
   "No!" replied Marie, her head down, her eyes on her watch. "You know me but I don't know you! Who are you?"
   "A friend of your husband."
   "My God, is he here?"
   "The question is why are you here?"
   "I stayed at this hotel once before. I thought he might remember it."
   "He did but in the wrong context, I'm afraid. Mon Dieu, he never would have chosen it otherwise. Now, leave."
   "I won't! I have to find him. Where is he?"
   "You will leave or you may find only his corpse. There's a message for you in the Paris Tribune-"
   "It's in my purse. The financial page. 'Memom-' "
   "Call in several hours."
   "You can't do this to me."
   "You cannot do this to him. You'll kill him! Get out of here. Now!"
   Her eyes half blinded with fury and fear and tears, Marie started toward the left side of the lobby, desperately wanting to look back, but just as desperately knowing she could not do so. She reached the narrow set of glass double doors, colliding with a uniformed bellhop carrying suitcases inside.
   "Pardon, madame!"
   "Moi aussi," she stammered, maneuvering again blindly around the luggage and out to the pavement. What could she do-what should she do? David was somewhere in the hotel-in the hotel! And a strange man recognized her and warned her and told her to get out-get away! What was happening? ... My God, someone's trying to kill David! The old Frenchman had said as much-who was it... who were they? Where were they?
   Help me! For God's sake, Jason, tell me what to do. Jason? ... Yes, Jason ... help me! She stood, frozen, as taxis and limousines broke off from the noonday traffic and pulled up to the Meurice's curb, where a gold-braided doorman under the huge canopy greeted newcomers and old faces and sent bellboys scurrying in all directions. A large black limousine with a small discreet religious insignia on its passenger door, the cruciform standard of some high office of the Church, inched its way to the canopied area. Marie stared at the small emblem; it was circular and no more than six inches in diameter, a globe of royal purple surrounding an elongated crucifix of gold. She winced and held her breath; her panic now had a disturbing new dimension. She had seen that insignia before, and all she remembered was that it had filled her with horror.
   The limousine stopped; both curbside doors were opened by the smiling, bowing doorman as five priests emerged, one from the front seat, four from the spacious rear section. Those from the back immediately, oddly, threaded their way into the noonday crowds of strollers on the pavement, two forward in front of the vehicle, two behind it, one of the priests whipping past Marie, his black coat making contact with her, his face so close she could see the blazing unpriestly eyes of a man who was no part of a religious order. ... Then the association with the emblem, the religious insignia, came back to her!
   Years ago, when David-when Jason-was in maximum therapy with Panov, Mo had him sketch, draw, doodle whatever images came to him. Time and again that terrible circle with the thin crucifix appeared ... invariably torn apart or stabbed repeatedly with the pencil point. The Jackal!
   Suddenly, Marie's eyes were drawn to a figure crossing the rue de Rivoli. It was a tall man in dark clothes-a dark sweater and trousers-and he was limping, dodging the traffic, a hand shielding his face from the drizzle that soon would turn into rain. The limp was false! The leg straightened if only for an instant and the swing of the shoulder that compensated was a defiant gesture she knew only too well. It was David!
   Another, no more than eight feet from her, also saw what she saw. A miniature radio was instantly brought to the man's lips. Marie rushed forward, her extended hands the claws of a tigress as she lunged at the killer in priest's clothing.
   "David!" she screamed, drawing blood from the face of the Jackal's man.
   Gunshots filled the rue de Rivoli. The crowds panicked, many running into the hotel, many more racing away from the canopied entrance, all shrieking, yelling, seeking safety from the murderous insanity that had suddenly exploded in the civilized street. In the violent struggle with the man who would kill her husband, the strong Canadian ranch girl ripped the automatic out of his belt and fired it into his head; blood and membranes were blown into the air.
   "Jason!" she screamed again as the killer fell, instantly realizing that she stood alone with only the corpse beneath her-she was a target! Then from certain death there was the sudden possibility of life. The old aristocratic Frenchman who had recognized her in the lobby came crashing out of the front entrance, his automatic weapon on repeat fire as he sprayed the black limousine, stopping for an instant to switch his aim and shattering the legs of a "priest" whose weapon was leveled at him.
   "Mon ami!" roared Bernardine.
   "Here!" shouted Bourne. "Where is she?"
   "A votre droite! Auprès de-" A single gunshot exploded from the glass double doors of the Meurice. As he fell the Deuxième veteran cried out, "Les Capucines, mon ami. Les Capucines!" Bernardine slumped to the pavement; a second gunshot ended his life.
   Marie was paralyzed, she could not move! Everything was a blizzard, a hurricane of iced particles crashing with such force against her face she could neither think nor find meaning. Weeping out of control, she fell to her knees, then collapsed in the street, her screams of despair clear to the man who suddenly was above her. "My children ... oh God, my children!"
   "Our children," said Jason Bourne, his voice not the voice of David Webb. "We're getting out of here, can you understand that?"
   "Yes ... yes!" Marie awkwardly, painfully, swung her legs behind her and lurched to her feet, held by the husband she either knew or did not know. "David?"
   "Of course I'm David. Come on!"
   "You frighten me-"
   "I frighten myself. Let's go! Bernardine gave us our exit. Run with me; hold my hand!"
   They raced down the rue de Rivoli, swinging east into the boulevard St.-Michel until the Parisian strollers in their nonchalance de jour made it clear that the fugitives were safe from the horrors of the Meurice. They stopped m an alleyway and held each other.
   "Why did you do it?" asked Marie, cupping his face. "Why did you run away from us?"
   "Because I'm better without you, you know that."
   "You weren't before, David-or should I say Jason?"
   "Names don't matter, we have to move!"
   "Where to?"
   "I'm not sure. But we can move, that's the important thing. There's a way out. Bernardine gave it to us."
   "He was the old Frenchman?"
   "Let's not talk about him, okay? At least not for a while. I'm shredded enough."
   "All right, we won't talk about him. Still, he mentioned Les Capucines-what did he mean?"
   "It's our way out. There's a car waiting for me in the boulevard des Capucines. That's what he was telling me. Let's go!"
   They raced south out of Paris in the nondescript Peugeot, taking the Barbizon highway to Vilieneuve-St.-Georges. Marie sat close to her husband, their bodies touching, her hand clutching his arm. She was, however, sickeningly aware that the warmth she intended was not returned in equal measure. Only a part of the intense man behind the wheel was her David; the rest of him was Jason Bourne and he was now in command.
   "For God's sake, talk to me!" she cried.
   "I'm thinking. ... Why did you come to Paris?"
   "Good Christ!" exploded Marie. "To find you, to help you!"
   "I'm sure you thought it was right. ... It wasn't, you know."
   "That voice again," protested Marie. "That goddamned disembodied tone of voice! Who the hell do you think you are to make that judgment? God? To put it bluntly-no, not bluntly, but brutally-there are things you have trouble remembering, my darling."
   "Not about Paris," objected Jason. "I remember everything about Paris. Everything."
   "Your friend Bernardine didn't think so! He told me you never would have chosen the Meurice if you did."
   "What?" Bourne briefly, harshly glanced at his wife.
   "Think. Why did you choose-and you did choose-the Meurice?"
   "I don't know ... I'm not sure. It's a hotel; the name just came to me."
   "Think. What happened years ago at the Meurice-right outside the Meurice?"
   "I-I know something happened. ... You?"
   "Yes, my love, me. I stayed there under a false name and you came to meet me, and we walked to the newsstand on the corner, where in one horrible moment we both knew my life could never be the same again-with you or without you."
   "Oh, Jesus, I forgot! The newspapers-your photograph on all the front pages. You were the Canadian government official-"
   "The escaped Canadian economist," broke in Marie, "hunted by the authorities all over Europe for multiple killings in Zurich in tandem with the theft of millions from Swiss banks! Those kinds of headlines never leave a person, do they? They can be refuted, proved to be totally false, yet still there is that lingering doubt. 'Where there's smoke there must be fire,' I believe is the bromide. My own colleagues in Ottawa ... dear, dear friends I'd worked with for years ... were afraid to talk to me!"
   "Wait a minute!" shouted Bourne, his eyes again flashing at David's wife. "They were false-it was a Treadstone ploy to pull me in-you were the one who understood it, I didn't!"
   "Of course I did, because you were so stretched you couldn't see it. It didn't matter to me then because I'd made up my mind, my very precise analytical mind, a mind I'd match against yours any day of the week, my sweet scholar."
   "What?"
   "Watch the road! You missed the turn, just the way you missed the one to our cabin only days ago-or was it years ago?"
   "What the hell are you talking about?"
   "That small inn we stayed at outside the Barbizon. You politely asked them to please light the fire in the dining room-we were the only people there. It was the third time I saw through the mask of Jason Bourne to someone else, someone I was falling deeply in love with."
   "Don't do this to me."
   "I have to, David. If only for myself now. I have to know you're there."
   Silence. A U-turn on the grand-route and the driver pressed the accelerator to the floor. "I'm here," whispered the husband, lifting his right arm and pulling his wife to him. "I don't know for how long, but I'm here."
   "Hurry, my darling."
   "I will. I just want to hold you in my arms."
   "And I want to call the children."
   "Now I know I'm here."

28
   "You'll tell us everything we want to know voluntarily or we'll send you up into a chemical orbit your hacks never dreamed of with Dr. Panov," said Peter Holland, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his quiet monotone as hard and as smooth as polished granite. "Furthermore, I should elaborate on, the extremes to which I'm perfectly willing to go because I'm from the old school, paisan. I don't give a shit for rules that favor garbage. You play cipher with me, I'll deep-six you still breathing a hundred miles off Hatteras in a torpedo casing. Am I clear?"
   The capo subordinato, thick plaster casts around his left arm and right leg, lay on the bed in Langley's deserted infirmary room, deserted since the DCI ordered the medical staff to get out of hearing range for their own good. The mafioso's naturally puffed face was additionally enlarged by swellings around both eyes as well as his generous lips, the result of his head having smashed into the dashboard when Mo Panov sent the car into a Maryland oak. He looked up at Holland, his heavy-lidded gaze traveling over to Alexander Conklin seated in a chair, the ever-present cane gripped in anxious hands.
   "You got no right, Mr. Big Shot," said the capo gruffly. " 'Cause I got rights, you know what I mean?"
   "So did the doctor, and you violated them-Jesus, did you violate them!"
   "I don't gotta talk without my lawyer."
   "Where the hell was Panov's lawyer?" shouted Alex, thumping his cane on the floor.
   "That's not the way the system works," protested the patient, attempting to raise his eyebrows in indignation. "Besides, I was good to the doc. He took advantage of my goodness, help me God!"
   "You're a cartoon," said Holland. "You're a hot sketch but you're not remotely amusing. There are no lawyers here, linguine, just the three of us, and a torpedo casing is very much in your future."
   "Whaddaya want from me?" cried the mafioso. "What do I know? I just do what I'm told, like my older brother did-may he rest in peace-and my father-may he also rest in peace-and probably his father, which I don't know nothin' about."
   "It's like succeeding generations on welfare, isn't it?" observed Conklin. "The parasites never get off the dole."
   "Hey, that's my family you're talkin' about-whatever the fuck you're talkin' about."
   "My apologies to your heraldry," added Alex.
   "And it's that family of yours we're interested in, Augie," broke in the DCI. "It is Augie, isn't it? That was the name on one of the five driver's licenses and we thought it seemed most authentic."
   "Well, you're not so authentically bright, Mr. Big Shot!" spat out the immobilized patient through his painfully swollen lips. "I got none of them names."
   "We have to call you something," said Holland. "If only to burn it into the casing down at Hatteras so that some scale-headed archaeologist several thousand years from now can give an identity to the teeth he's measuring."
   "How about Chauncy?" asked Conklin.
   "Too ethnic," replied Peter. "I like Asshole because that's what he is. He's going to be strapped into a tube and dropped over the continental shelf into six miles of seawater for crimes other people committed. I mean, that's being an asshole."
   "Cut it out!" roared the asshole. "Awright, my name's Nicolo ... Nicholas Dellacroce, and for even giving you that you gotta get me protection! Like with Valachi, that's part of the deal."
   "It is?" Holland frowned. "I don't remember mentioning it."
   "Then you don't get nuthin'!"
   "You're wrong, Nicky," broke in Alex from across the small room. "We're going to get everything we want, the only drawback being that it's a one-time shot. We won't be able to cross-examine you, or bring you into a federal court, or even have you sign a deposition."
   "Huh?"
   "You'll come out a vegetable with a refried brain. Of course, I suppose it's a blessing in a way. You'll hardly know it when you're packed into that shell casing in Hatteras."
   "Hey, waddaya talkin'?"
   "Simple logic," answered the former naval commando and present head of the Central Intelligence Agency. "After our medical team gets finished with you, you can't expect us to keep you around, can you? An autopsy would railroad us to a rock pile for thirty years and, frankly, I haven't got that kind of time. ... What'll it be, Nicky? You want to talk to us or do you want a priest?"
   "I gotta think-"
   "Let's go, Alex," said Holland curtly, walking away from the bed toward the door. "I'll send for a priest. This poor son of a bitch is going to need all the comfort he can get."
   "It's times like this," added Conklin, planting his cane on the floor and rising, "when I seriously ponder man's inhumanity to man. Then I rationalize. It's not brutality, for that's only a descriptive abstraction; it's merely the custom of the trade we're all in. Still, there's the individual-his mind and his flesh and his all too sensitive nerve endings. It's the excruciating pain. Thank heavens I've always been in the background, out of reach-like Nicky's associates. They dine in elegant restaurants and he goes over in a tube beyond the continental shelf, six miles down in the sea, his body imploding into itself."
   "Awright, awright!" screamed Nicolo Dellacroce, twisting on the bed, his obese frame tangling the sheets. "Ask your fuckin' questions, but you give me protection, capisce?"
   "That depends on the truthfulness of your answers," said Holland, returning to the bed.
   "I'd be very truthful, Nicky," observed Alex, limping back to the chair. "One misstatement and you sleep with the fishes-I believe that's the customary phrase."
   "I don't need no coaching, I know where it's at."
   "Let's begin, Mr. Dellacroce," said the CIA chief, taking a small tape recorder out of his pocket, checking the charge and placing it on the high white table by the patient's bed. He drew up a chair and continued speaking, addressing his opening remarks to the thin silver recorder. "My name is Admiral Peter Holland, currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency, voice confirmation to be verified if necessary. This is an interview with an informer we'll call John Smith, voice distortion to follow on interagency master tape, identification in the DCI's classified files. ... All right, Mr. Smith, we're going to cut through the bullshit to the essential questions. I'll generalize them as much as possible for your protection, but you'll know exactly what I'm referring to and I expect specific answers. ... Whom do you work for, Mr. Smith?"
   "Atlas Coin Vending Machines, Long Island City," replied Dellacroce, his words slurred and spoken gruffly.
   "Who owns it?"
   "I dunno who owns it. Most of us work from home-some fifteen, maybe twenty guys, you know what I mean? We service the machines and send in our reports."
   Holland glanced over at Conklin; both men smiled. With one answer the mafioso had placed himself within a large circle of potential informers. Nicolo was not new to the game. "Who signs your paychecks, Mr. Smith?"
   "A Mr. Louis DeFazio, a very legitimate businessman, to d'best of my knowledge. He gives us our assignments."
   "Do you know where he lives?"
   "Brooklyn Heights. On the river, I think someone told me."
   "What was your destination when our personnel intercepted you?"
   Dellacroce winced, briefly closing his swollen eyes before answering. "One of those drunk-and-dope tanks somewhere south of Philly-which you already know, Mr. Big Shot, 'cause you found the map in the car."
   Holland angrily reached for the recorder, snapping it off. "You're on your way to Hatteras, you son of a bitch!"
   "Hey, you get your info your way, I give it mine, okay? There was a map-there's always a map-and each of us has to take those cockamamy back roads to the joint like we were driving the president or even a don superiore to an Appalachian meet. ... You gimme that message pad and the pencil, I'll give you the location right down to the brass plate on the stone gate." The mafioso raised his uncased right arm and jabbed his index finger at the DCI. "It'll be accurate, Mr. Big Shot, because I don't wanna sleep with no fishes, capisce?"
   "But you won't put it on tape," said Holland, a disturbed inflection in his voice. "Why not?"
   "Tape, shit! What did you call it? An interagency master bullshit? What do you think ... our people can't tap into this place? Hoo-hah! That fuckin' doctor of yours could be one of us!"
   "He's not, but we're going to get to an army doctor who is." Peter Holland picked up the message pad and pencil from the bedside table, handing both to Dellacroce. He did not bother to switch on the tape recorder. They were beyond props and into hardball.

   In New York City, on 138th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, the hard core of Harlem, a large disheveled black man in his mid-thirties staggered up the sidewalk. He bounced off the chipped brick wall of a run-down apartment building and slumped down on the pavement, his legs extended, his unshaven face angled into the right collar of his torn army-surplus shirt.
   "With the looks I'm getting," he said quietly into the miniaturized microphone under the cloth, "you'd think I'd invaded the high colonic white shopping district of Palm Springs."
   "You're doing beautifully," came the metallic voice over the tiny speaker sewn into the back of the agent's collar. "We've got the place covered; we'll give you plenty of notice. That answering machine's so jammed it's sending out whistling smoke."
   "How did you two lily boys get into that trap over there?"
   "Very early this morning, so early no one noticed what we looked like."
   "I can't wait to watch you get out; it's a needle condo if I ever saw one. Speaking of which, which we are in a way, are the cops on this beat alerted? I'd hate like hell to get hauled in after growing this bristle on my face. It itches like crazy and my new wife of three weeks doesn't dig it."
   "You should have stayed with the first one, buddy."
   "Funny little white boy. She didn't like the hours or the geography. Like in being away for weeks at a time playing games in Zimbabwe. Answer me, please?"
   "The blue coats have your description and the scenario. You're part of a federal bust, so they'll leave you alone. ... Hold it! Conversation's over. This has to be our man; he's got a telephone satchel strapped to his belt. ... It is. He's heading for the doorway. It's all yours, Emperor Jones."
   "Funny little white boy. ... I've got him and I can tell you now he's a soft chocolate mousse. He's scared shitless to go into this palace."
   "Which means he's legitimate," said the metallic voice in the collar. "That's good."
   "That's bad, junior," countered the black agent instantly.
   "If you're right, he doesn't know anything, and the layers between him and the source will be as thick as Southern molasses."
   "Oh? Then how do you read it?"
   "On-scene tech. I have to see the numbers when he programs them into his troubleshooter."
   "What the hell does that mean?"
   "He may be legit, but he's also been frightened and not by the premises."
   "What does that mean?"
   "It's all over his face, man. He could enter in false numbers if he thinks he's being followed or watched."
   "You've lost me, buddy."
   "He has to duplicate the digits that correspond to the remote so the beeps can be relayed-"
   "Forget it," said the voice from the back of the collar. "That high-tech I'm not. Besides, we got a man down at that company, Reco-something-or-other, now. He's waiting for you."
   "Then I've got work to do. Out, but keep me monitored." The agent rose from the pavement and unsteadily made his way into the dilapidated building. The telephone repairman had reached the second floor, where he turned right in the narrow, filthy corridor; he had obviously been there before, as there was no hesitation, no checking the barely legible numbers on the doors. Things were going to be a little easier, considered the CIA man, grateful because his assignment was beyond the purview of the Agency. Purview, shit, it was illegal.
   The agent took the steps three at a time, his soft double-soled rubber shoes reducing the noise to the inevitable creaks of an old staircase. His back against the wall, he peered around the corner of the trash-filled hallway and watched the repairman insert three separate keys into three vertical locks, turning each in succession and entering the last door on the left. Things, reconsidered the agent, might not be so easy after all. The instant the man closed the door, he ran silently down the corridor and stood motionless, listening. Not wonderful, but not the worst, he thought as he heard the sound of only one lock being latched; the repairman was in a hurry. He placed his ear against the peeling paint of the door and held his breath, no echo from his lungs disturbing his hearing. Thirty seconds later he turned his head, exhaled, then took a deep breath and went back to the door. Although muffled, he heard the words clearly enough to piece together the meaning.
   "Central, this is Mike up on a Hundred Thirty-eighth Street, section twelve, machine sixteen. Is there another unit in this building, which I wouldn't believe if you said there was." The following silence lasted perhaps twenty additional seconds. ... We don't, huh? Well, we got a frequency interference and it don't make no sense to me. ... The what? Cable TV? Ain't no one in this neighborhood got the bread for that. ... Oh, I gotcha, brother. Area cable. The drug boys live high, don't they? Their addresses may be shit, but inside them homes they got theyselves a pile of fancy crap. ... So clear the line and reroute it. I'll stay here until I get a clean signal, okay, brother?"
   The agent again turned away from the door and again breathed, now in relief. He could leave without a confrontation; he had all he needed. One Hundred Thirty-eighth Street, section twelve, machine sixteen, and they knew the firm that installed the equipment. The Reco-Metropolitan Company, Sheridan Square, New York. The lily-whites could handle it from there. He walked back to the questionable staircase and lifted the collar of his army-surplus shirt. "In case I get run over by a truck, here's the input. Are you reading me?"
   "Loud and clear, Emperor Jones."
   "It's machine sixteen in what they call section twelve."
   "Got it! You've earned your paycheck."
   "You might at least say, 'Outstanding, old chap.' "
   "Hey, you're the guy who went to college over there, not me."
   "Some of us are overachievers. ... Hold it! I've got company!"
   Below on the bottom of the staircase a small compact black man appeared, his dark eyes bulging, staring up at the agent, a gun in his hand. The CIA man spun behind the edge of the wall as four successive gunshots shattered the corridor. Lunging across the open space, his revolver ripped from its holster, the agent fired twice, but once was enough. His assailant fell to the floor of the soiled lobby.
   "I caught a ricochet in my leg!" cried the agent. "But he's down-deep dead or not I can't tell. Sweep up the vehicle and get us both out. Pronto."
   "On its way. Stay put!"
   It was shortly past eight o'clock the next morning when Alex Conklin limped into Peter Holland's office. The guards at the CIA gates were impressed with his immediate access to the director.
   "Anything?" asked the DCI, looking up from the papers on his desk.
   "Nothing," answered the retired field officer angrily, heading for the couch against the wall rather than a chair. "Not a goddamned thing. Jesus, what a fucked-up day and it hasn't even begun! Casset and Valentino are down in the cellars sending out queries all over the Paris sewers but so far nothing. ... Christ, look at the scenario and find me a thread! Swayne, Armbruster, DeSole-our mute son of a bitch, the mole. Then for God's sake, Teagarten with Bourne's calling card, when we know damned well it's a trap for Jason set by the Jackal. But there's no logic anywhere that ties Carlos to Teagarten and by extension to Medusa. Nothing makes sense, Peter. We've lost the spine-everything's gone off the wire!"
   "Calm down," said Holland gently.
   "How the hell can I? Bourne's disappeared-I mean really disappeared, if he isn't dead. And there's no trace of Marie, no word from her, and then we learn that Bernardine was killed in a shoot-out only hours ago on the Rivoli-Christ, shot in broad daylight! And that means Jason was there-he had to be there!"
   "But since none of the dead or wounded fits his description, we can assume he got away, can't we?"
   "We can hope, yes."
   "You asked for a thread," mused the DCI. "I'm not sure I can actually provide one, but I can give you something like it.
   "New York?" Conklin sat forward on the couch. "The answering machine? That DeFazio hood in Brooklyn Heights?"
   "We'll get to New York, to all of that-them. Right now let's concentrate on that thread of yours, that spine you mentioned."
   "I'm not the slowest kid on the block, but where is it?"
   Holland leaned back in his chair, gazing first at the papers on his desk and then up at Alex. "Seventy-two hours ago, when you decided to come clean with me about everything, you said that the idea behind Bourne's strategy was to persuade the Jackal and this latter-day Medusa to join forces, with Bourne as the common target, one feeding the other. Wasn't that basically the premise? Both sides wanted him killed. Carlos had two reasons-revenge and the fact that he believes Bourne could identify him; the Medusans because Bourne had pieced together so much about them?"
   "That was the premise, yes," agreed Conklin, nodding. "It's why I dug around and made those phone calls, never expecting to find what I did. Jesus, a global cartel born twenty years ago in Saigon, peopled by some of the biggest fish in and out of the government and the military. It was the kind of pay dirt I didn't want and wasn't looking for. I thought I might dig up maybe ten or twelve hotshot millionaires with post-Saigon bank accounts that couldn't bear scrutiny, but not this, not this Medusa."
   "To put it as simply as possible," continued Holland, frowning, his eyes again straying down to the papers in front of him, then up at Alex. "Once the connection was made between Medusa and Carlos, word would be passed to the Jackal that there was a man Medusa wanted eliminated, and cost was no object. So far, yes?"
   "The key here was the caliber and the status of those reaching Carlos," explained Conklin. "They had to be as close to bona fide Olympians as we could find, the kind of clients the Jackal doesn't get and never got."
   "Then the name of the target is revealed-say, in a way such as 'John Smith, once known years ago as Jason Bourne'-and the Jackal is hooked. Bourne, the one man he wants dead above all others."
   "Yes. That's why the Medusans reaching Carlos had to be so solid, so above questioning that Carlos accepts them and dismisses any sort of a trap."
   "Because," added the CIA's director, "Jason Bourne came out of Saigon's Medusa-a fact known to Carlos-but he never shared in the riches of the later, postwar Medusa. That's the background scenario, isn't it?"
   "The logic's as clean as it can be. For three years he was used and damn near killed in a black operation, and along the way he supposedly discovered that more than a few undistinguished Saigon pricks were driving Jaguars and were sailing yachts and pulling down six-figure retainers while he went on a government pension. That could try the patience of John the Baptist, to say nothing of Barabbas."
   "It's a terrific libretto," allowed Holland, a slow smile breaking across his face. "I can hear the tenors soaring in triumph and the Machiavellian bassos slinking offstage in defeat. ... Don't scowl at me, Alex, I mean it! It's really ingenious. It's so inevitable it became a self-fulfilling prophecy."
   "What the hell are you talking about?"
   "Your Bourne was right from the beginning. It all took place the way he saw it, but not in any way he could have imagined. Because it was inevitable; somewhere there had to be a cross-pollinator."
   "Please come down from Mars and explain to an earthling, Peter."
   "Medusa's using the Jackal! Now. Teagarten's assassination proves it unless you want to concede that Bourne actually blew up that car outside of Brussels."
   "Of course not."
   "Then Carlos's name had to surface for someone in Medusa who already knew about Jason Bourne. It couldn't be otherwise. You didn't mention either one to Armbruster, or Swayne, or Atkinson in London, did you?"
   "Again, of course not. The time wasn't right; we weren't ready to pull those triggers."
   "Who's left?" asked Holland.
   Alex stared at the DCI. "Good Lord," he said softly. "DeSole?"
   "Yes, DeSole, the grossly underpaid specialist who complained amusingly but incessantly that there was no way a man could properly educate his children and grandchildren on government pay. He was brought in on everything we discussed, starting with your assault on us in the conference room."
   "He certainly was, but that was limited to Bourne and the Jackal. There was no mention of Armbruster or Swayne, no Teagarten or Atkinson-the new Medusa wasn't even in the picture. Hell, Peter, you didn't know about it until seventy-two hours ago."
   "Yes, but DeSole did because he'd sold out; he was part of it. He had to have been alerted. '... Watch it. We've been penetrated. Some maniac says he's going to expose us, blow us apart.' ... You told me yourself that panic buttons were punched from the Trade Commission to Pentagon Procurements to the embassy in London."
   "They were punched," agreed Conklin. "So hard that two of them had to be taken out along with Teagarten and our disgruntled Mole. Snake Lady's elders quickly decided who their vulnerable people were. But where does Carlos or Bourne fit in? There's no attribution."
   "I thought we agreed that there was."
   "DeSole?" Conklin shook his head. "It's a provocative thought, but it doesn't wash. He couldn't have presumed that I knew about Medusa's penetration because we hadn't even started it."
   "But when you did, the sequence had to bother him if only in the sense that although they were poles apart, one crisis followed too quickly upon another. What was it? A matter of hours?"
   "Less than twenty-four ... Still, they were poles apart."
   "Not for an analyst's analyst," countered Holland. "If it walks like an odd duck and sounds like an odd duck, look for an odd duck. I submit that somewhere along the line DeSole made the connection between Jason Bourne and the madman who had infiltrated Medusa-the new Medusa."
   "For Christ's sake, how?"
   "I don't know. Maybe because you told us Bourne came out of the old Saigon Medusa-that's one hell of a connection to begin with."
   "My God, you may be right," said Alex, falling back on the couch. "The driving force we gave our unnamed madman was that he'd been cut off from, the new Medusa. I used the words myself with every phone call. 'He's spent years putting it together. ...' 'He's got names and ranks and banks in Zurich. ...'Jesus, I'm blind! I said those things to total strangers on a telephone fishing expedition and never even thought about having mentioned Bourne's origins in Medusa at that meeting when DeSole was here."
   "Why should you have thought about it? You and your man decided to play a separate game all by yourselves."
   "The reasons were goddamned valid," broke in Conklin. "For all I knew, you were a Medusan."
   "Thanks a bunch."
   "Come on, don't give me that shit. 'We've got a top max out at Langley' ... those were the words I heard from London. What would you have thought, what would you have done?"
   "Exactly what you did," answered Holland, a tight grin on his lips. "But you're supposed to be so bright, so much smarter than I'm supposed to be."
   "Thanks a bunch."
   "Don't be hard on yourself; you did what any of us would have done in your place."
   "For that I do thank you. And you're right, of course. It had to be DeSole; how he did it, I don't know, but it had to be him. It probably went back years inside his head-he never really forgot anything, you know. His mind was a sponge that absorbed everything and never let a recollection drip away. He could remember words and phrases, even spontaneous grunts of approval or disapproval the rest of us forgot. ... And I gave him the whole Bourne-Jackal history-and then someone from Medusa used it in Brussels."
   "They did more than that, Alex," said Holland, leaning forward in his chair and picking up several papers from his desk. "They stole your scenario, usurped your strategy. They've pitted Jason Bourne against Carlos the Jackal, but instead of the controls being in your hands, Medusa has them. Bourne's back where he was in Europe thirteen years ago, maybe with his wife, maybe not, the only difference being that in addition to Carlos and Interpol and every other police authority on the continent ready to waste him on sight, he's got another lethal monkey on his back."
   "That's what's in those pages you're holding, isn't it? The information from New York?"
   "I can't guarantee it, but I think so. It's the cross-pollinator I spoke about before, the bee that went from one rotten flower to another carrying poison."
   "Deliver, please."
   "Nicolo Dellacroce and the higher-ups above him."
   "Mafia?"
   "It's consistent, if not socially acceptable. Medusa grew out of Saigon's officer corps and it still relegates its dirty work to the hungry grunts and corrupt NCOs. Check out Nicky D. and men like Sergeant Flannagan. When it comes to killing or kidnapping or using drugs on prisoners, the starched-shirt boys stay far in the background; they're nowhere to be found."
   "But I gather you found them," said the impatient Conklin.
   "Again, we think so-we being our people in quiet consultation with New York's anticrime division, especially a unit called the U.S. platoon."
   "Never heard of it."
   "They're mostly Italian Americans; they gave themselves the name Untouchable Sicilians. Thus the U.S. initials with a dual connotation."
   "Nice touch."
   "Unnice work. ... According to the Reco-Metropolitan's billing files-"
   "The who?"
   "The company that installed the answering machine on One Hundred Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan."
   "Sorry. Go on."
   "According to the files, the machine was leased to a small importing firm on Eleventh Avenue several blocks from the piers. An hour ago we got the telephone records for the past two months for the company, and guess what we found?"
   "I'd rather not wait," said Alex emphatically.
   "Nine calls to a reasonably acceptable number in Brooklyn Heights, and three in the space of an hour to an extremely unlikely telephone on Wall Street."
   "Someone was excited-"
   "That's what we thought-we in this case being our own unit. We asked the Sicilians to give us what they had on Brooklyn Heights."
   "DeFazio?"
   "Let's put it this way. He lives there, but the phone is registered to the Atlas Coin Vending Machine Company in Long Island City."
   "It fits. Dumb, but it fits. What about DeFazio?"
   "He's a middle-level but ambitious capo in the Giancavallo family. He's very close, very underground, very vicious ... and very gay."
   "Holy Christ ... !"
   "The Untouchables swore us to secrecy. They intend to spring it themselves."
   "Bullshit," said Conklin softly. "One of the first things we learn in this business is to lie to anyone and everyone, especially anyone who's foolish enough to trust us. We'll use it anytime it gets us a square forward. ... What's the other telephone number, the unlikely one?"
   "Just about the most powerful law firm on Wall Street."
   "Medusa," concluded Alex firmly.
   "That's the way I read it. They've got seventy-six lawyers on two floors of the building. Which one is it-or who among them are they?"
   "I don't give a goddamn! We go after DeFazio and whatever controls he's sending over to Paris. To Europe to feed the Jackal. They're the guns after Jason and that's all I care about. Go to work on DeFazio. He's the one under contract!"
   Peter Holland leaned back in his chair, rigid, intense. "It had to come to this, didn't it, Alex?" he asked quietly. "We both have our priorities. ... I'd do anything within my sworn capacity to save the lives of Jason Bourne and his wife, but I will not violate my oath to defend this country first. I can't do it and I suspect you know that. My priority is Medusa, in your words a global cartel that intends to become a government within our government over here. That's whom I have to go after. First and immediately and without regard to casualties. To put it plainly, my friend-and I hope you're my friend-the Bournes, or whoever they are, are expendable. I'm sorry, Alex."
   "That's really why you asked me to come over here this morning, isn't it?" said Conklin, planting his cane on the floor and awkwardly getting to his feet.
   "Yes, it is."
   "You've got your own game plan against Medusa-and we can't be a part of it."
   "No, you can't. It's a fundamental conflict of interest."
   "I'll grant you that. We'd louse you up in a minute if it'd help Jason and Marie. Naturally, my personal and professional opinion is that if the whole fucking United States government can't rip out a Medusa without sacrificing a man and a woman who've given so much, I'm not sure it's worth a damn!"
   "Neither am I," said Holland, standing up behind the desk. "But I swore an oath to try-in order of my sworn priorities."
   "Have I got any perks left?"
   "Anything I can get you that doesn't compromise our going after Medusa."
   "How about two seats on a military aircraft, Agencycleared, to Paris."
   "Two seats?"
   "Panov and me. We went to Hong Kong together, why not Paris?"
   "Alex, you're out of your goddamned mind!"
   "I don't think you understand, Peter. Mo's wife died ten years after they were married, and I never had the courage to give it a try. So you see, 'Jason Bourne' and Marie are the only family we have. She makes a hell of a meat loaf, let me tell you."
   "Two tickets to Paris," said Holland, his face ashen.

29
   Marie watched her husband as he walked back and forth, the pacing deliberate, energized. He tramped angrily between the writing table and the sunlit curtains of the two windows overlooking the front lawn of the Auberge des Artistes in Barbizon. The country inn was the one Marie remembered, but it was not part of David Webb's memory; and when he said as much, his wife briefly closed her eyes, hearing another voice from years ago.
   "Above everything, he's got to avoid extreme stress, the kind of tension that goes with survival under life-threatening circumstances. If you see him regressing into that state of mind-and you'll know it when you see it-stop him. Seduce him, slap him, cry, get angry ... anything, just stop him." Morris Panov, dear friend, doctor and the guiding force behind her husband's therapy.
   She had tried seduction within minutes after they were alone together. It was a mistake, even a touch farcical, awkward for both of them. Neither was remotely aroused. Yet there was no embarrassment; they held each other on the bed, both understanding.
   "We're a couple of real sexpots, aren't we?" said Marie.
   "We've been there before," replied David Webb gently, "and I've no doubt we'll be there again." Then Jason Bourne rolled away and stood up. "I have to make a list," he said urgently, heading for the quaint country table against the wall that served as a desk and a place for the telephone. "We have to know where we are and where we're going."
   "And I have to call Johnny on the island," added Marie, rising to her feet and smoothing her skirt. "After I talk to him I'll speak to Jamie. I'll reassure him and tell him we'll be back soon." The wife crossed to the table; she stopped, blocked by her husband-her husband yet not her husband.
   "No," said Bourne quietly, shaking his head.
   "Don't say that to me," protested the mother, anger flashing in her eyes.
   "Three hours ago in the Rivoli changed everything. Nothing's the same now. Don't you understand that?"
   "I understand that my children are several thousand miles away from me and I intend to reach them. Don't you understand that?"
   "Of course I do, I just can't allow it," answered Jason.
   "Goddamn you, Mr. Bourne!"
   "Will you listen to me? ... You'll talk to Johnny and to Jamie-we'll both talk to them-but not from here and not while they're on the island."
   "What ... ?"
   "I'm calling Alex in a few minutes and telling him to get all of them out of there, including Mrs. Cooper, of course."
   Marie had stared at her husband, suddenly understanding. "Oh, my God, Carlos!"
   "Yes. As of this noon he's got only one place to zero in on-Tranquility. If he doesn't know now, he'll learn soon enough that Jamie and Alison are with Johnny. I trust your brother and his personal Tonton Macoute, but I still want them away from there before it's night in the islands. I also don't know if Carlos has sources in the island's trunk lines that could trace a call between there and here, but I do know that Alex's phone is sterile. That's why you can't call now. From here to there."
   "Then, for God's sake, call Alex! What the hell are you waiting for?"
   "I'm not sure." For a moment there was a blank, panicked look in her husband's eyes-they were the eyes of David Webb, not Jason Bourne. "I have to decide-where do I send the kids?"
   "Alex will know, Jason," said Marie, her own eyes leveled steadily on his. "Now."
   "Yes ... yes, of course. Now." The veiled, vacuous look passed and Bourne reached for the phone.
   Alexander Conklin was not in Vienna, Virginia, U.S.A. Instead, there was the monotonic voice of a recorded operator that had the effect of crashing thunder. "The telephone number you have called is no longer in service."
   He had placed the call twice again, believing in desperate hope that an error had been made by the French telephone service. Then bolts of lightning followed: "The telephone number you have called is no longer in service." For a third time.
   The pacing had begun; from the table to the windows and back again. Over and over, the curtains were pulled aside, anxious eyes nervously peering out, then seconds later poring over a growing list of names and places. Marie suggested lunch; he did not hear her, so she watched him in silence from across the room.
   The quick, abrupt movements of her husband were like those of a large disquieted cat, smooth, fluid, alert for the unexpected. They were the movements of Jason Bourne and, before him, Medusa's Delta, not David Webb. She remembered the medical records compiled by Mo Panov in the early days of David's therapy. Many were filled with wildly divergent descriptions from people who claimed to have seen the man known as the Chameleon, but among the most reliable was a common reference to the catlike mobility of the "assassin." Panov had been looking for clues to Jason Bourne's identity then, for all they had at the time were a first name and fragmented images of painful death in Cambodia. Mo often wondered aloud if there was more to his patient's physical dexterity than mere athleticism; oddly enough, there was not.
   As Marie looked back the subtle physical differences between the two men who were her husband both fascinated and repelled her. Each was muscular and graceful, each capable of performing difficult tasks requiring physical coordination; but where David's strength and mobility came from an easy sense of accomplishment, Jason's was filled with an inner malice, no pleasure in the accomplishment, only a hostile purpose. When she had mentioned this to Panov, his reply was succinct: "David couldn't kill. Bourne can; he was trained to."
   Still, Mo was pleased that she had spotted the different "physical manifestations," as he called her observation. "It's another signpost for you. When you see Bourne, bring David back as fast as you can. If you can't, call me."
   She could not bring David back now, she thought. For the sake of the children and herself and David, she dared not try.
   "I'm going out for a while," announced Jason by the window.
   "You can't!" cried Marie. "For God's sake, don't leave me alone."
   Bourne frowned, lowering his voice, somewhere an undefined conflict within him. "I'm just driving out on the highway to find a phone, that's all."
   "Take me with you. Please. I can't stay by myself any longer."
   "All right. ... As a matter of fact, we'll need a few things. We'll find one of those malls and buy some clothes-toothbrushes, a razor ... whatever else we can think of."
   "You mean we can't go back to Paris."
   "We can and probably will go back to Paris, but not to our hotels. Do you have your passport?"
   "Passport, money, credit cards, everything. They were all in my purse, which I didn't know I had until you gave it to me in the car."
   "I didn't think it was such a good idea to leave it at the Meurice. Come on. A phone first."
   "Who are you calling?"
   "Alex."
   "You just tried him."
   "At his apartment; he was thrown out of his security tent in Virginia. Then I'll reach Mo Panov. Let's go."
   They drove south again to the small city of Corbeil-Essonnes, where there was a relatively new shopping center several miles west of the highway. The crowded merchandising complex was a blight on the French countryside but a welcome sight for the fugitives. Jason parked the car, and like any husband and wife out for late-afternoon shopping, they strolled down the central mall, all the while frantically looking for a public telephone.
   "Not a goddamned one on the highway!" said Bourne through clenched teeth. "What do they think people are supposed to do if they have an accident or a flat tire?"
   "Wait for the police," answered Marie, "and there was a phone, only it was broken into. Maybe that's why there aren't more– There's one."
   Once again Jason went through the irritating process of placing an overseas call with local operators who found it irritating to ring through to the international branch of the system. And then the thunder returned, distant but implacable.
   "This is Alex," said the recorded voice over the line. "I'll be away for a while, visiting a place where a grave error was made. Call me in five or six hours. It's now nine-thirty in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. Out, Juneau."
   Stunned, his mind spinning, Bourne hung up the phone and stared at Marie. "Something's happened and I have to make sense out of it. His last words were-'Out, Juneau.' "
   "Juneau?" Marie squinted, her eyes blocking out the light, then she opened them and looked at her husband. "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie," she began softly, adding, "Alternating military alphabets?" Then she spoke rapidly. "Foxtrot, Gold ... India, Juneau! Juneau's for J and J is for Jason! ... What was the rest?"
   "He's visiting someplace-"
   "Come on, let's walk," she broke in, noticing the curious faces of two men waiting to use the phone; she grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the booth. "He couldn't be clearer?" she asked as they entered the flow of the crowds.
   "It was a recording. '... where a grave error was made.' "
   "The what?"
   "He said to call him in five or six hours-he was visiting a place where a grave error-grave?-my God, it's Rambouillet!"
   "The cemetery ... ?"
   "Where he tried to kill me thirteen years ago. That's it! Rambouillet!"
   "Not in five or six hours," objected Marie. "No matter when he left the message he couldn't fly to Paris and then drive to Rambouillet in five hours. He was in Washington."
   "Of course he could; we've both done it before. An army jet out of Andrews Air Force Base under diplomatic cover to Paris. Peter Holland threw him out, but he gave him a going away present. Immediate separation, but a bonus for bringing him Medusa." Bourne suddenly whipped his wrist up and looked at his watch. "It's still only around noon in the islands. Let's find another phone."
   "Johnny? Tranquility? You really think-"
   "I can't stop thinking!" interrupted Jason, rushing ahead, holding Marie's hand as she stumblingly kept up with him. "Glace," he said, looking up to his right.
   "Ice cream?"
   "There's a phone inside, over there," he answered, slowing them both down and approaching the huge windows of a pâtisserie that had a red banner over its door announcing an ice cream counter with several dozen flavors. "Get me a vanilla," he said, ushering them both into the crowded store.
   "Vanilla what?"
   "Whatever."
   "You won't be able to hear-"
   "He'll hear me, that's all that matters. Take your time, give me time." Bourne crossed to the phone, instantly understanding why it was not used; the noise of the store was nearly unbearable. "Mademoiselle, s'il vous plaît, c'est urgent!" Three minutes later, holding his palm against his left ear, Jason had the unexpected comfort of hearing Tranquility Inn's most irritating employee over the phone.
   "This is Mr. Pritchard, Tranquility Inn's associate manager. My switchboard informs me that you have an emergency, sir. May I inquire as to the nature of your-"
   "You can shut up!" shouted Jason from the cacophonous ice cream parlor in Corbeil-Essonnes in France. "Get Jay St. Jay on the phone, now. This is his brother-in-law."
   "Oh, it is such a pleasure to hear from you, sir! Much has happened since you left. Your lovely children are with us and the handsome young boy plays on the beach-with me, sir-and all is-"
   "Mr. St. Jacques, please. Now!"
   "Of course, sir. He is upstairs. ..."
   "Johnny?"
   "David, where are you?"
   "That doesn't matter. Get out of there. Take the kids and Mrs. Cooper and get out!"
   "We know all about it, Dave. Alex Conklin called several hours ago and said somebody named Holland would reach us. ... I gather he's the chief honcho of your intelligence service."
   "He is. Did he?"
   "Yeah, about twenty minutes after I talked to Alex. He told us we were being choppered out around two o'clock this afternoon. He needed the time to clear a military aircraft in here. Mrs. Cooper was my idea; your backward son says he doesn't know how to change diapers, sport. ... David, what the hell is going on? Where's Marie?"
   "She's all right-I'll explain everything later. Just do as Holland says. Did he say where you were being taken?"
   "He didn't want to, I'll tell you that. But no fucking American's going to order me and your kids around-my Canadian sister's kids-and I told him that in a seven spade flush."
   "That's nice, Johnny. Make friends with the director of the CIA."
   "I don't give a shit on that score. In my country we figure those initials mean Caught In the Act, and I told him so!"
   "That's even nicer. ... What did he say?"
   "He said we were going to a safe house in Virginia, and I said mine's pretty goddamned safe right here and we had a restaurant and room service and a beach and ten guards who could shoot his balls off at two hundred yards."
   "You're full of tact. And what did he say to that?"
   "Actually, he laughed. Then he explained that his place had twenty guards who could take out one of my balls at four hundred yards, along with a kitchen and room service and television for the kids that I couldn't match."
   "That's pretty persuasive."
   "Well, he said something else that was even more persuasive that I really couldn't match. He told me there was no public access to the place, that it was an old estate in Fairfax turned over to the government by a rich ambassador who had more money than Ottawa, with its own airfield and an entrance road four miles from the highway."
   "I know the place," said Bourne, wincing at the noise of the pâtisserie. "It's the Tannenbaum estate. He's right; it's the best of the sterile houses. He likes us."
   "I asked you before-where's Marie?"
   "She's with me."
   "She found you!"
   "Later, Johnny. I'll reach you in Fairfax." Jason hung up the phone as his wife awkwardly made her way through the crowd and handed him a pink plastic cup with a blue plastic spoon plunged into a mound of dark brown.
   "The children?" she asked, raising her voice to be heard, her eyes on fire.
   "Everything's fine, better than we might have expected. Alex reached the same conclusion about the Jackal as I did. Peter Holland's flying them all up to a safe house in Virginia, Mrs. Cooper included."
   "Thank God!"
   "Thank Alex." Bourne looked at the pink plastic cup with the thin blue spoon. "What the hell is this? They didn't have vanilla?"
   "It's a hot fudge sundae. It was meant for the man beside me but he was yelling at his wife, so I took it."
   "I don't like hot fudge."
   "So yell at your wife. Come on, we've got to buy clothes."
   The early afternoon Caribbean sun burned down on Tranquility Inn as John St. Jacques descended the staircase into the lobby carrying a LeSport duffel bag in his right hand. He nodded to Mr. Pritchard, whom he had spoken to over the phone only moments ago, explaining that he was leaving for several days and would be in touch within hours after he reached Toronto. What remained of the staff had been apprised of his sudden, quite necessary departure, and he had full confidence in the executive manager and his valuable assistant, Mr. Pritchard. He assumed that no problems would arise beyond their combined expertise. Tranquility Inn, for all intents and purposes, was virtually shut down. However, Sir Henry Sykes at Government House on the big island should be contacted in the event of difficulties.
   "There shall be none beyond my expertise!" Pritchard had replied. "The repair and maintenance crews will work every bit as hard in your absence."
   St. Jacques walked out the glass doors of the circular building toward the first villa on the right, the one nearest the stone steps to the pier and the two beaches. Mrs. Cooper and the two children waited inside for the arrival of the United States Navy long-range seagoing helicopter that would take them to Puerto Rico, where they would board a military jet to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.
   Through the huge glass windows, Mr. Pritchard watched his employer disappear through the doors of Villa One. At that same moment he heard the growing sounds of a large helicopter's rotors thumping in the air above the inn. In minutes it would circle the water beyond the pier and descend, awaiting its passengers. Apparently, those passengers heard what he had heard, thought Mr. Pritchard as he saw St. Jacques, gripping his young nephew's hand, and the insufferably arrogant Mrs. Cooper, who was holding a blanketed infant in her arms, come out of the villa, followed by the two favorite guards carrying their luggage. Pritchard reached below the counter for the telephone that bypassed the switchboard. He dialed.
   "This is the office of the deputy director of immigration, himself speaking."
   "Esteemed Uncle-"
   "It is you?" broke in the official from Blackburne Airport, abruptly lowering his voice. "What have you learned?"
   "Everything is of immense value, I assure you. I heard it all on the telephone!"
   "We shall both be greatly rewarded, I have that on the highest authority. They may all be undercover terrorists, you know, St. Jacques himself the leader. It is said they may even fool Washington. What can I pass on, brilliant Nephew?"
   "They are being taken to what is called a 'safe' house in Virginia. It is known as the Tannenbaum estate and has its own airport, can you believe such a thing?"
   "I can believe anything where these animals are concerned."
   "Be sure to include my name and position, esteemed Uncle."
   "Would I do otherwise, could I do otherwise? We shall be the heroes of Montserrat! ... But remember, my intelligent Nephew, everything must be kept in utmost secrecy. We are both sworn to silence, never forget that. Just think! We've been selected to render service to a great international organization. Leaders the world over will know of our contributions."
   "My heart bursts with pride. ... May I know what this august organization is called?"
   "Shhh! It has no name; that is part of the secrecy. The money was wired through a bank computer transfer directly from Switzerland; that is the proof."
   "A sacred trust," added Mr. Pritchard.
   "Also well paid, trusted Nephew, and it is only the beginning. I myself am monitoring all aircraft arriving here and sending the manifests on to Martinique, to a famous surgeon, no less! Of course, at the moment all flights are on hold, orders from Government House."
   "The American military helicopter?" asked the awed Pritchard.
   "Shhh! It, too, is a secret, everything is secret."
   "Then it is a very loud and apparent secret, my esteemed Uncle. People are on the beach watching it now."
   "What?"
   "It's here. Mr. Saint Jay and the children are boarding as we speak. Also that dreadful Mrs. Cooper-"
   "I must call Paris at once," interrupted the immigration officer, disconnecting the line.
   "Paris?" repeated Mr. Pritchard. "How inspiring! How privileged we are!"
   "I didn't tell him everything," said Peter Holland quietly, shaking his head as he spoke. "I wanted to-I intended to-but it was in his eyes, in his own words actually. He said that he'd louse us up in a minute if it would help Bourne and his wife."
   "He would, too." Charles Casset nodded; he sat in the chair in front of the director's desk, a computer printout of a long-buried classified file in his hand. "When you read this you'll understand. Alex really did try to kill Bourne in Paris years ago-his closest friend and he tried to put a bullet in his head for all the wrong reasons."
   "Conklin's on his way to Paris now. He and Morris Panov."
   "That's on your head, Peter. I wouldn't have done it, not without strings."
   "I couldn't refuse him."
   "Of course you could. You didn't want to."
   "We owed him. He brought us Medusa-and from here on, Charlie, that's all that concerns us."
   "I understand, Director Holland," said Casset coldly. "And I assume that due to foreign entanglements you're working backwards into a domestic conspiracy that should be incontestably established before you alert the guardians of domestic accord, namely, the Federal Bureau."
   "Are you threatening me, you lowlife?"
   "I certainly am, Peter." Casset dropped the ice from his expression, replacing it with a calm, thin smile. "You're breaking the law, Mr. Director. ... That's regrettable, old boy, as my predecessors might have said."
   "What the hell do you want from me?" cried Holland.
   "Cover one of our own, one of the best we ever had. I not only want it, I insist upon it."
   "If you think I'm going to give him everything, including the name of Medusa's law firm on Wall Street, you're out of your fucking mind. It's our keystone!"
   "For God's sake, go back into the navy, Admiral," said the deputy director, his voice level, again cold, without emphasis. "If you think that's what I'm suggesting, you haven't learned very much in that chair."
   "Hey, come on, smart ass, that's pretty close to insubordination."
   "Of course it is, because I'm insubordinate-but this isn't the navy. You can't keelhaul me, or hang me from the yardarm, or withhold my ration of rum. All you can do is fire me, and if you do, a lot of people will wonder why, which wouldn't do the Agency any good. But that's not necessary."
   "What the hell are you talking about, Charlie?"
   "Well, to begin with, I'm not talking about that law firm in New York because you're right, it is our keystone, and Alex with his infinite imagination would probe and threaten to the point where the shredding begins and our paper trail here and abroad ends."
   "I had something like that in mind-"
   "Then again you were right," interrupted Casset, nodding. "So we keep Alex away from our keystone, as far away from us as possible, but we give him our marker. Something tangible he can plug into, knowing its value."
   Silence. Then Holland spoke. "I don't understand a word you're saying."
   "You would if you knew Conklin better. He knows now that there's a connection between Medusa and the Jackal. What did you call it? A self-fulfilling prophecy?"
   "I said the strategy was so perfect it was inevitable and therefore self-fulfilling. DeSole was the unexpected catalyst who moved everything ahead of schedule-him and whatever the hell happened down in Montserrat. ... What's this marker of yours, this tangible item of value?"
   "The string, Peter. Knowing what he knows, you can't let Alex bounce around Europe like a loose cannon any more than you could give him the name of that law firm in New York. We need a pipeline to him so we have some idea what he's up to-more than an idea, if we can manage it. Someone like his friend Bernardine, only someone who can also be our friend."
   "Where do we find such a person?"
   "I have a candidate-and I hope we're not being taped."
   "Count on it," said Holland with a trace of anger. "I don't believe in that crap and this office is swept every morning. Who's the candidate?"
   "A man at the Soviet embassy in Paris," replied Casset calmly. "I think we can deal."
   "A mole?"
   "Not for a minute. A KGB officer whose first priority never changes. Find Carlos. Kill Carlos. Protect Novgorod."
   "Novgorod ... ? The Americanized village or town where the Jackal was initially trained in Russia?"
   "Half trained and escaped from before he could be shot as a maniac. Only, it's not just an American compound-that's a mistake we make so often. There are British and French compounds, too, also Israeli, Dutch, Spanish, West German and God knows how many others. Dozens of square miles cut out of the forests along the Volkhov River, dotted with settlements so that you'd swear you were in a different country with each one you entered-if you could get inside, which you couldn't. Like the Aryan breeding farms, the Lebensborn of Nazi Germany, Novgorod is one of Moscow's most closely guarded secrets. They want the Jackal as badly as Jason Bourne does."
   "And you think this KGB fellow will cooperate, keep us informed about Conklin if they make contact?"
   "I can try. After all, we have a common objective, and I know Alex would accept him because he knows how much the Soviets want Carlos on the dead list."
   Holland leaned forward in his chair. "I told Conklin I'd help him any way I could as long as it didn't compromise our going after Medusa. ... He'll be landing in Paris within the hour. Shall I leave instructions at the diplomatic counter for him to reach you?"
   "Tell him to call Charlie Bravo Plus One," said Casset, getting up and dropping the computer printout on the desk. "I don't know how much I can give him in an hour, but I'll go to work. I've got a secure channel to our Russian, thanks to an outstanding 'consultant' of ours in Paris."
   "Give him a bonus."
   "She's already asked for one-harassed me is more appropriate. She runs the cleanest escort service in the city; the girls are checked weekly."
   "Why not hire them all?" asked the director, smiling.
   "I believe seven are already on the payroll, sir," answered the deputy director, his demeanor serious, in contrast to his arched eyebrows.
   Dr. Morris Panov, his legs unsteady, was helped down the metal steps of the diplomatically cleared jet by a strapping marine corporal in starched summer khakis carrying his suitcase. "How do you people manage to look so presentable after such a perfectly horrendous trip?" asked the psychiatrist.
   "None of us will look this presentable after a couple of hours of liberty in Paris, sir."
   "Some things never change, Corporal. Thank God. ... Where's that crippled delinquent who was with me?"
   "He was vehicled off for a diplograph, sir."
   "Come again? A noun's a verb leading to the incomprehensible?"
   "It's not so hard, Doctor," laughed the marine, leading Panov to a motorized cart complete with a uniformed driver and a stenciled American flag on the side. "During our descent, the tower radioed the pilot that there was an urgent message for him."
   "I thought he went to the bathroom."
   "That, too, I believe, sir." The corporal put the suitcase on a rear rack and helped Mo into the cart. "Easy now, Doctor, lift your leg up a little higher."
   "That's the other one, not me," protested the psychiatrist. "He's the one without a foot."
   "We were told you'd been ill, sir."
   "Not in my goddamned legs. ... Sorry, young man, no offense. I just don't like flying in small tubes a hundred and ten miles up in the sky. Not too many astronauts come from Tremont Avenue in the Bronx."
   "Hey, you're kidding, Doc!"
   "What?"
   "I'm from Garden Street, you know, across from the zoo! The name's Fleishman, Morris Fleishman. Nice to meet a fellow Bronxite."
   "Morris?" said Panov, shaking hands. "Morris the Marine? I should have had a talk with your parents. ... Stay well, Mo. And thank you for your concern."
   "You get better, Doc, and when you see Tremont Avenue again, give it my best, okay?"
   "I will, indeed, Morris," replied Morris, raising his hand as the diplomatic cart shot forward.
   Four minutes later, escorted by the driver, Panov entered the long gray corridor that was the immigration-free access to France for government functionaries of nations accredited by the Quai d'Orsay. They walked into the large holding lounge where men and women were gathered in small groups, conversing quietly, the sounds of different languages filling the room. Alarmed, Mo saw that Conklin was nowhere in sight; he turned to the driver-escort as a young woman dressed in the neutral uniform of a hostess approached.
   "Docteur?" she asked, addressing Panov.
   "Yes," replied Mo, surprised. "But I'm afraid my French is pretty rusty if not nonexistent."
   "It's of no matter, sir. Your companion requested that you remain here until he returns. It will be no more than a few minutes, he was quite sure. ... Please, sit down. May I bring you a drink?"
   "Bourbon with ice, if you'd be so kind," answered Panov, lowering himself into the armchair.
   "Certainly, sir." The hostess retreated as the driver placed Mo's suitcase beside him.
   "I have to get back to my vehicle," said the diplomatic escort. "You'll be fine here."
   "I wonder where my friend went," mused Panov, glancing at his watch.
   "Probably to an outside phone, Doctor. They come in here, get messages at the counters, then go like hell into the terminal to find public pay phones; they don't like the ones in here. The Russkies always walk the fastest; the Arabs, the slowest."
   "Must be their respective climates," offered the psychiatrist, smiling.
   "Don't bet your stethoscope on it." The driver laughed and brought his hand up for an informal salute. "Take care, sir, and get some rest. You look tired."
   "Thank you, young man. Good-bye." I am tired, thought Panov as the escort disappeared into the gray corridor. So tired, but Alex was right. If he'd flown here alone, I would never have forgiven him. ... David! We've got to find him! The damage to him could be incalculable-none of them understands. With a single act his fragile, damaged mind could regress years-thirteen years-to where he was a functioning killer, and for him nothing else! ... A voice. The figure above was talking to him. "I'm sorry, forgive me. ... Your drink, Doctor," said the hostess pleasantly. "I debated whether to wake you, but then you moved and sounded as though you were in pain-"
   "No, not at all, my dear. Just tired."
   "I understand, sir. Sudden flights can be so exhausting, and if they are long and uncomfortable, even worse."
   "You touched on all three points, miss," agreed Panov, taking his drink. "Thank you."
   "You are American, of course."
   "How could you tell? I'm not wearing cowboy boots or a Hawaiian shirt."
   The woman laughed charmingly. "I know the driver who brought you in here. He's American security, and quite nice, very attractive."
   "Security? You mean like in 'police'?"
   "Oh, very much so, but we never use the word. ... Oh, here's your companion coming back inside." The hostess lowered her voice. "May I ask quickly, Doctor? Does he require a wheelchair?"
   "Good heavens, no. He's walked like that for years."
   "Very well. Enjoy your stay in Paris, sir." The woman left as Alex, limping, weaved around several groups of chattering Europeans to the chair next to Panov. He sat down and leaned forward awkwardly in the soft leather. He was obviously disturbed.
   "What's the matter?" asked Mo.
   "I just talked to Charlie Casset in Washington."
   "He's the one you like, the one you trust, isn't he?"
   "He's the best there is when he has personal access, or, at least, human intelligence. When he can see and hear and look for himself, and not simply read words on paper or a computer screen without asking questions."
   "Are you, perchance, moving into my territory again, Doctor Conklin?"
   "I accused David of that last week and I'll tell you what he told me. It's a free country, and your training notwithstanding, you don't have a franchise on common sense."
   "Mea culpa," agreed Panov, nodding. "I gather your friend did something you don't approve of."
   "He did something he wouldn't approve of if he had more information on whom he did it with."
   "That sounds positively Freudian, even medically imprudent."
   "Both are part of it, I guess. He made an outside unsanctioned deal with a man named Dimitri Krupkin at the Russian embassy here in Paris. We'll be working with the local KGB-you, me, Bourne and Marie-if and when we find them. Hopefully, in Rambouillet in an hour or so."
   "What are you saying?" asked Mo, astonished and barely audible.
   "Long story, short time. Moscow wants the Jackal's head, the rest of him separated from it. Washington can't feed us or protect us, so the Soviets will act as our temporary paterfamilias if we find ourselves in a bind."
   Panov frowned, then shook his head as though absorbing very strange information, then spoke. "I suppose it's not your run-of-the-mill development, but there's a certain logic, even comfort, to it."
   "On paper, Mo," said Conklin. "Not with Dimitri Krupkin. I know him. Charlie doesn't."
   "Oh? He's one of the evil people?"
   "Kruppie evil? No, not really-"
   "Kruppie?"
   "We go way back as young hustlers to Istanbul in the late sixties and Athens after that, then Amsterdam later. ... Krupkin's not malevolent, and he works like a son of a bitch for Moscow with a damn good second-rate mind, better than eighty percent of the clowns in our business, but he's got a problem. He's fundamentally on the wrong side, in the wrong society. His parents should have come over with mine when the Bolsheviks took the throne."
   "I forget. Your family was Russian."
   "Speaking the language helps with Kruppie. I can nail his nuances. He's the quintessential capitalist. Like the economic ministers in Beijing, he doesn't just like money, he's obsessed with it-and everything that goes with it. Out of sight and out of sanction, he could be bought."
   "You mean by the Jackal?"
   "I saw him bought in Athens by Greek developers selling additional airstrips to Washington when they knew the Communists were going to throw us out. They paid him to shut up. Then I watched him broker diamonds in Amsterdam between the merchants on the Nieuwmarkt and the dacha-elite in Moscow. We had drinks one night in the Kattengat and I asked him, 'Kruppie, what the fuck are you doing?' You know what he said? He said in clothes I couldn't afford, 'Aleksei, I'll do everything I can to outsmart you, to help the supreme Soviet to gain world dominance, but in the meantime, if you'd like a holiday, I have a lovely house on the lake in Geneva.' That's what he said, Mo."
   "He's remarkable. Of course, you told your friend Casset all this-"
   "Of course I didn't," broke in Conklin.
   "Good God, why not?"
   "Because Krupkin obviously never told Charlie that he knew me. Casset may have the deal, but I'm dealing."
   "With what? How?"
   "David-Jason-has over five million in the Caymans. With only a spit of that amount I'll turn Kruppie so he'll be working only for us, if we need him or want him to."
   "Which means you don't trust Casset."
   "Not so," said Alex. "I trust Charlie with my life. It's just that I'm not sure I want it in his hands. He and Peter Holland have their priorities and we have ours. Theirs is Medusa; ours are David and Marie."
   "Messieurs?" The hostess returned and addressed Conklin. "Your car has arrived, sir. It is on the south platform."
   "You're sure it's for me?" asked Alex.
   "Forgive me, monsieur, but the attendant said a Mr. Smith had a difficult leg."
   "He's certainly right about that."
   "I've called a porter to carry your luggage, messieurs. It's a rather long walk. He'll meet you on the platform."
   "Thanks very much." Conklin got to his feet and reached into his pocket, pulling out money.
   "Pardon, monsieur," interrupted the hostess. "We are not permitted to accept gratuities."
   "That's right. I forgot. ... My suitcase is behind your counter, isn't it?"
   "Where your escort left it, sir. Along with the doctor's, it will be at the platform within minutes."
   "Thanks again," said Alex. "Sorry about the tip."
   "We are well paid, sir, but thank you for the thought."
   As they walked to the door that led into the main terminal of Orly Airport, Conklin turned to Panov. "How did she know you were a doctor?" he asked. "You soliciting couch business?"
   "Hardly. The commuting would be a bit strenuous."
   "Then how? I never said anything about your being a doctor."
   "She knows the security escort who brought me into the lounge. In fact, I think she knows him quite well. She said in that delectable French accent of hers that he was 'verry attractiefe.' "
   Looking up at the signs in the crowded terminal, they started toward the south platform.
   What neither of them saw was a distinguished-looking olive-skinned man with wavy black hair and large dark eyes walk quickly out of the diplomatic lounge, his steady gaze directed at the two Americans. He crossed to the wall, rushing past the crowds until he was diagonally in front of Conklin and Panov near the taxi platform. Then, squinting, as if unsure, he removed a small photograph from his pocket and kept glancing at it as he raised his eyes and looked up at the departing passengers from the United States. The photograph was of Dr. Morris Panov, dressed in a white hospital gown, a glazed, unearthly expression on his face.
   The Americans went out on the platform; the dark-haired man did the same. The Americans looked around for a taxi; the dark-haired man signaled a private car. A driver got out of a cab; he approached Conklin and Panov, speaking quietly, as a porter arrived with their luggage; the two Americans climbed into the taxi. The stranger who followed them slipped into the private car two vehicles behind the cab.
   "Pazzo!" said the dark-haired man in Italian to the fashionably dressed middle-aged woman behind the wheel. "I tell you it's crazy! For three days we wait, all incoming American planes watched, and we are about to give up when that fool in New York turns out to be right. It's them! ... Here, I'll drive. You get out and reach our people over there. Tell them to call DeFazio; instruct him to go to his other favorite restaurant and await my call to him. He is not to leave until we speak."
   "Is this you, old man?" asked the hostess in the diplomatic lounge, speaking softly into the telephone at her counter.
   "It is I," replied the quavering voice at the other end of the line. "And the Angelus rings for eternity in my ears."
   "It is you, then."
   "I told you that, so get on with it."
   "The list we were given last week included a slender middle-aged American with a limp, possibly accompanied by a doctor. Is this correct?"
   "Correct! And?"
   "They have passed through. I used the title 'Doctor' with the cripple's companion and he responded to it."
   "Where have they gone? It's vital that I know!"
   "It was not disclosed, but I will soon learn enough for you to find out, old man. The porter who took their luggage to the south platform will get the description and the license of the car that meets them."
   "In the name of God, call me back with the information!"
   Three thousand miles from Paris, Louis DeFazio sat alone at a rear table in Trafficante's Clam House on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. He finished his late afternoon lunch of vitello tonnato and dabbed his lips with the bright red napkin, trying to look his usual jovial, if patronizing, self. However, if the truth were known, it was all he could do to stop from gnawing on the napkin rather than caressing his mouth with it. Maledetto! He had been at Trafficante's for nearly two hours-two hours! And it had taken him forty-five minutes to get there after the call from Garafola's Pasta Palace in Manhattan, so that meant it was actually over two hours, almost three, since the gumball in Paris, France, spotted two of the targets. How long could it take for two bersaglios to get to a hotel in the city from the airport? Like three hours? Not unless the Palermo gumball drove to London, England, which was not out of the question, not if one knew Palermo.
   Still, DeFazio knew he had been right! The way the Jew shrink talked under the needle there was no other route he and the ex-spook could take but to Paris and their good buddy, the fake hit man. ... So Nicolo and the shrink disappeared, went poof-zam, so what the fuck? The Jew got away and Nicky would do time. But Nicolo wouldn't talk; he understood that bad trouble, like a knife in the kidney, was waiting for him wherever he went if he did. Besides, Nicky didn't know anything so specific the lawyers couldn't wipe away as secondhand horseshit from a fifth-rate horse's ass. And the shrink only knew he was in a room in some farmhouse, if he could even remember that. He never saw anybody but Nicolo when he was "compass mantis," as they say.
   But Louis DeFazio knew he was right. And because he was right, there were more than seven million big ones waiting for him in Paris. Seven million! Holy Christ! He could give the Palermo gumballs in Paris more than they ever expected and still walk away with a bundle.
   An old waiter from the old country, an uncle of Trafficante, approached the table and Louis held his breath. "There's a telephone call for you, Signor DeFazio."
   As was usual, the capo supremo went to a pay phone at the end of a narrow dark corridor outside the men's room. "This is New York," said DeFazio:
   "This is Paris, Signor New York. This is also pazzo!"
   "Where've you been? You pazzo enough to drive to London, England? I've been waitin' three hours!"
   "Where I've been is on a number of unlit country roads, which is important only to my nerves. Where I am now is crazy!"
   "So where?"
   "I'm using a gatekeeper's telephone for which I'm paying roughly a hundred American dollars and the French buffone keeps looking through the window to see that I don't steal anything-perhaps his lunch pail, who knows?"
   "You don't sound too stupid for a gumball. So what gatekeeper's what? What are you talking about?"
   "I'm at a cemetery about twenty-five miles from Paris. I tell you-"
   "A cimitero?" interrupted Louis. "What the hell for?"
   "Because your two acquaintances drove here from the airport, you ignorante! At the moment there is a burial in progress-a night burial with a candlelight procession which will soon be drowned out by rain-and if your two acquaintances flew over here to attend this barbaric ceremony, then the air in America is filled with brain-damaging pollutants! We did not bargain for this sciocchezze, New York. We have our own work to do."
   "They went there to meet the big cannoli," said DeFazio quietly, as if to himself. "As to work, gumball, if you ever want to work with us, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or Los Angeles again, you'll do what I tell you. You'll also be terrifically paid for it, capisce?"
   "That makes more sense, I admit."
   "Stay out of sight, but stay with them. Find out where they go and who they see. I'll get over there as soon as I can, but I gotta go by way of Canada or Mexico, just to make sure no one's watching. I'll be there late tomorrow or early the next day."
   "Ciao," said Paris.
   "Omerta," said Louis DeFazio.

30
   The hand-held candles flickered in the night drizzle as the two parallel lines of mourners walked solemnly behind the white casket borne on the shoulders of six men; several began to slip on the increasingly wet gravel of the cemetery's path. Flanking the procession were four drummers, two on each side, their snare drums snapping out the slow cadence of the death march, erratically out of sequence because of the unexpected rocks and the unseen flat grave markers in the darkness of the bordering grass. Shaking his head slowly in bewilderment, Morris Panov watched the strange nocturnal burial rite, relieved to see Alex Conklin limping, threading his way between the tombstones toward their meeting ground.
   "Any sign of them?" asked Alex.
   "None," replied Panov. "I gather you didn't do any better."
   "Worse. I got stuck with a lunatic."
   "How?"
   "A light was on in the gatehouse, so I went over thinking David or Marie might have left us a message. There was a clown outside who kept looking into a window and said he was the watchman and did I want to rent his telephone."
   "His telephone?"
   "He said there were special rates for the night, as the nearest pay phone was ten kilometers down the road."
   "A lunatic," agreed Panov.
   "I explained that I was looking for a man and a woman I was to meet here and wondered if they'd left a message. There was no message but there was the telephone. Two hundred francs-crazy."
   "I might do a flourishing business in Paris," said Mo, smiling. "Did he by any chance see a couple wandering around?"
   "I asked him that and he nodded affirmative, saying there were dozens. Then he pointed to that candlelight parade over there before going back to his goddamn window."
   "What is that parade, incidentally?"
   "I asked him that, too. It's a religious cult; they bury their dead only at night. He thinks they may be gypsies. He said that while blessing himself."
   "They're going to be wet gypsies," observed Panov, pulling up his collar as the drizzle turned into rain.
   "Christ, why didn't I think of it?" exclaimed Conklin, looking over his shoulder.
   "The rain?" asked the bewildered psychiatrist.
   "No, the large tomb halfway up the hill beyond the gatehouse. It's where it happened!"
   "Where you tried to-" Mo did not finish the question; he did not have to.
   "Where he could have killed me but didn't," completed Alex. "Come on!"
   The two Americans retreated down the gravel path past the gatehouse and into the darkness of the rising hill of grass punctuated by white gravestones now glistening in the rain. "Easy," cried Panov, out of breath. "You're used to that nonexistent foot of yours, but I haven't quite adjusted to my pristine body having been raped by chemicals."
   "Sorry."
   "Mo!" shouted a woman's voice from a marble portico above. The figure waved her arms beneath the pillared, overhanging roof of a grave so large it looked like a minor mausoleum.
   "Marie?" yelled Panov, rushing ahead of Conklin.
   "That's nice!" roared Alex, limping with difficulty up the wet slippery grass. "You hear the sound of a female and suddenly you're unraped. You need a shrink, you phony!"
   The embraces were meant; a family was together. While Panov and Marie spoke quietly, Jason Bourne took Conklin aside to the edge of the short marble roof, the rain now harsh. The former candlelight procession below, the flickering flames now gone, was half scattered, half holding its position by a gravesite. "I didn't mean to choose this place, Alex," said Jason. "But with that crowd down there I couldn't think of another."
   "Remember the gatehouse and that wide path to the parking lot? ... You'd won. I was out of ammunition and you could have blown my head apart."
   "You're wrong, how many times have I told you? I couldn't have killed you. It was in your eyes; even though I wasn't able to see them clearly I knew what was there. Anger and confusion, but, above all, confusion."
   "That's never been a reason not to kill a man who tries to kill you."
   "It is if you can't remember. The memory may be gone but not the fragments, not the-well, for me they were ... pulsating images. In and out, in and out, but there."
   Conklin looked up at Bourne, a sad grin on his face. "The pulsating bit," he said. "That was Mo's term. You stole it."
   "Probably," said Jason as both men in unison looked back at Marie and Panov. "She's talking about me, you know that, don't you?"
   "Why not? She's concerned and he's concerned."
   "I hate to think how many more concerns I'll give them both. You, too, I imagine."
   "What are you trying to tell me, David?"
   "Just that. Forget David. David Webb doesn't exist, not here, not now. He's an act I put on for his wife, and I do it badly. I want her to go back to the States, to her children."
   "Her children? She won't do it. She came over to find you and she found you. She remembers Paris thirteen years ago and she won't leave you. Without her then you wouldn't be alive today."
   "She's an impediment. She has to go. I'll find a way."
   Alex looked up at the cold eyes of the creation once known as the Chameleon and spoke quietly. "You're a fifty-year-old man, Jason. This isn't Paris thirteen years ago or Saigon years before that. It's now, and you need all the help you can get. If she thinks she can provide a measure of it, I for one believe her."
   Bourne snapped his head down at Conklin. "I'll be the judge of who believes what."
   "That's a touch extreme, pal."
   "You know what I mean," said Jason, softening his tone. "I don't want to have happen here what happened in Hong Kong. That can't be a problem for you."
   "Maybe not. ... Look, let's get out of here. Our driver knows a little country restaurant in Epernon, about six miles from here, where we can talk. We've got several things to go over."
   "Tell me," said Bourne. "Why Panov? Why did you bring Mo with you?"
   "Because if I hadn't he would have put strychnine in my flu shot."
   "What the hell does that mean?"
   "Exactly what it says. He's a part of us, and you know it better than Marie or myself."
   "Something happened to him, didn't it? Something happened to him because of me."
   "It's over with and he's back, that's all you have to know now."
   "It was Medusa, wasn't it?"
   "Yes, but I repeat, he's back, and outside of being a little tired, he's okay."
   "Little ... ? Which reminds me. A little country restaurant six miles from here, isn't that what your driver said?"
   "Yes, he knows Paris and everything around it thoroughly."
   "Who is he?"
   "A French Algerian who's worked for the Agency for years. Charlie Casset recruited him for us. He's tough, knowledgeable and very well paid for both. Above all, he can be trusted."
   "I suppose that's good enough."
   "Don't suppose, accept it."
   They sat in a booth at the rear of the small country inn, complete with a worn canopy, hard pine banquettes and perfectly acceptable wine. The owner, an expansive, florid fat man, proclaimed the cuisine to be extraordinary, but since no one could summon hunger, Bourne paid for four entrées just to keep the proprietor happy. It did. The owner sent over two large carafes of good vin ordinaire along with a bottle of mineral water, and stayed away from the table.
   "All right, Mo," said Jason, "you won't tell me what happened, or who did it, but you're still the same functioning, overbearing, verbose medicine man with a chicken in his mouth we've known for thirteen years, am I correct?"
   "Correct, you schizophrenic escapee from Bellevue. And in case you think I'm being heroic, let me make it absolutely clear that I'm here only to protect my nonmedical civil rights. My paramount interest is with my adorable Marie, who I trust you'll notice is sitting beside me, not you. I positively salivate thinking about her meat loaf."
   "Oh, how I do love you, Mo," said David Webb's wife, squeezing Panov's arm.
   "Let me count the ways," responded the doctor, kissing her cheek.
   "I'm here," said Conklin. "My name is Alex and I have a couple of things to talk about and they don't include meat loaf. ... Although I should tell you, Marie, I told Peter Holland yesterday that it was terrific."
   "What's with my damned meat loaf?"
   "It's the red sauce," interjected Panov.
   "May we get to what we're here for," said Jason Bourne, his voice a monotone.
   "Sorry, darling."
   "We'll be working with the Soviets." Conklin spoke quickly, his rush of words countering the immediate reaction from Bourne and Marie. "It's all right, I know the contact, I've known him for years, but Washington doesn't know I know him. His name is Krupkin, Dimitri Krupkin, and as I told Mo, he can be bought for five pieces of silver."
   "Give him thirty-one," interrupted Bourne, "to make sure he's on our side."
   "I figured you'd say that. Do you have a ceiling?"
   "None."
   "Not so fast," said Marie. "What's a negotiable starting point?"
   "Our economist speaks," proclaimed Panov, drinking his wine.
   "Considering his position in the Paris KGB, I'd say around fifty thousand, American."
   "Offer him thirty-five and escalate to seventy-five under pressure. Up to a hundred, if necessary, of course."
   "For Christ's sake," cried Jason, controlling his voice. "We're talking about us, about the Jackal. Give him anything he wants!"
   "Too easily bought, too easily turned to another source. To a counteroffer."
   "Is she right?" asked Bourne, staring at Conklin.
   "Normally, of course, but in this case it would have to be the equivalent of a workable diamond mine. No one wants Carlos in the dead file more than the Soviets, and the man who brings in his corpse will be the hero of the Kremlin. Remember, he was trained at Novgorod. Moscow never forgets that."
   "Then do as she says, only buy him," said Jason.
   "I understand." Conklin leaned forward, turning his glass of water. "I'll call him tonight, pay phone to pay phone, and get it settled. Then I'll arrange a meeting tomorrow, maybe lunch somewhere outside of Paris. Very early, before the regulars come in."
   "Why not here?" asked Bourne. "You can't get much more remote and I'll know the way."
   "Why not?" agreed Alex. "I'll talk to the owner. But not the four of us, just-Jason and me."
   "I assumed that," said Bourne coldly. "Marie's not to be involved. She's not to be seen or heard, is that clear?"
   "David, really-"
   "Yes, really."
   "I'll go over and stay with her," interrupted Panov quickly. "Meat loaf?" he added, obviously to lessen the tension.
   "I don't have a kitchen, but there's a lovely restaurant that serves fresh trout."
   "One sacrifices," sighed the psychiatrist.
   "I think you should eat in the room." Bourne's voice was now adamant.
   "I will not be a prisoner," said Marie quietly, her gaze fixed on her husband. "Nobody knows who we are or where we are, and I submit that someone who locks herself in her room and is never seen draws far more attention than a perfectly normal Frenchwoman who goes about her normal business of living."
   "She's got a point," observed Alex. "If Carlos has his network calling around, someone behaving abnormally could be picked up. Besides, Panov's from left field-pretend you're a doctor or something, Mo. Nobody'll believe it, but it'll add a touch of class. For reasons that escape me, doctors are usually above suspicion."
   "Psychopathic ingrate," mumbled Panov.
   "May we get back to business?" said Bourne curtly.
   "You're very rude, David."
   "I'm very impatient, do you mind?"
   "Okay, cool it," said Conklin. "We're all uptight, but things have got to be clear. Once Krupkin's on board, his first job will be to trace the number Gates gave Prefontaine in Boston."
   "Who gave what where?" asked the bewildered psychiatrist.
   "You were out of it, Mo. Prefontaine's an impeached judge who fell into a Jackal contact. To cut it short, the contact gave our judge a number here in Paris to reach the Jackal, but it didn't coincide with the one Jason already had. But there's no question that the contact, a lawyer named Gates, reached Carlos."
   "Randolph Gates? Boston's gift to the boardrooms of Genghis Khan?"
   "That's the one."
   "Holy Christ-I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that, I'm not a gentile. What the hell, I'm nothing, but you'll admit it's a shock."
   "A large one, and we have to know who owns that number here in Paris. Krupkin can find out for us. It's corkscrew, I grant you, but there it is."
   "Corkscrew?" asked Panov. "Are you now going to produce a Rubik's cube in Arabic? Or, perhaps, a Double-Crostic from the London Times? What in heaven's name is a Prefontaine, judge, jury or otherwise? It sounds like a bad early wine."
   "It's a late, very good vintage," broke in Marie. "You'd like him, Doctor. You could spend months studying him because he's got more brights than most of us, and that grand intellect of his is still intact despite such inconveniences as alcohol, corruption, loss of family and prison. He's an original, Mo, and where the majority of felons in his league blame everyone but themselves, he doesn't. He retains a gloriously ironic sense of humor. If the American judiciary had any brains-which on the surface the Justice Department would seem to refute-they'd put him back on the bench. ... He went after the Jackal's people on principle first, because they wanted to kill me and my children. If, on the second round, he makes a dollar, he deserves every penny and I'll see that he gets it."
   "You're succinct. You like him."
   "I adore him, as I adore you and Alex. You've all taken such risks for us-"
   "May we get back to what we're here for?" said the Chameleon angrily. "The past doesn't interest me, tomorrow does."
   "You're not only rude, my dear, you're terribly ungrateful."
   "So be it. Where were we?"
   "At the moment with Prefontaine," replied Alex sharply, looking at Bourne. "But he may not matter because he probably won't survive Boston. ... I'll call you at the inn at Barbizon tomorrow and set up a time for lunch. Out here. Clock yourself on the drive back so we're not hanging around like mateless snow geese. Also, if that fat guy's right about his 'cuisine,' Kruppie will love it and tell everybody he discovered it."
   "Kruppie?"
   "Relax. I told you, we go back a long time."
   "And don't go into it," added Panov. "You really don't want to hear about Istanbul and Amsterdam. They're both a couple of thieves."
   "We pass," said Marie. "Go on, Alex, what about tomorrow?"
   "Mo and I will take a taxi out to your place, and your husband and I will drive back here. We'll call you after lunch."
   "What about that driver of yours, the one Casset got you?" asked the Chameleon, his eyes cold, inquiring.
   "What about him? He'll be paid double what he can make in a month with his taxi for tonight, and after he drops us off at a hotel, he'll disappear. We won't see him again."
   "Will he see anyone else?"
   "Not if he wants to live and send money to his relatives in Algeria. I told you, Casset cleared him. He's granite."
   "Tomorrow, then," said Bourne grimly, looking across the table at Marie and Morris Panov. "After we leave for Paris, you're to stay out at Barbizon, and you're not to leave the inn. Do you both understand that?"
   "You know, David," answered Marie, bristling and rigid on the pine banquette. "I'm going to tell you something. Mo and Alex are as much a part of our family as the children, so I'll say it in front of them. We all, all of us, humor you and in some ways pamper you because of the horrible things you went through. But you cannot and you will not order us around as if we were inferior beings in your august presence. Do you understand that?"
   "Loud and clear, lady. Then maybe you should go back to the States so you won't have to put up with my august presence." Jason Bourne rose from the table, pushing the chair behind him. "Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, so I have to get some sleep-I haven't had much lately-and a better man than any of us here once told me that rest was a weapon. I believe that. ... I'll be in the car for two minutes. Take your choice. I'm sure Alex can get you out of France."
   "You bastard," whispered Marie.
   "So be it," said the Chameleon, walking away.
   "Go to him," interjected Panov quickly. "You know what's happening."
   "I can't handle it, Mo!"
   "Don't handle it, just be with him. You're the only rope he's got. You don't even have to talk, just be there. With him."
   "He's become the killer again."
   "He'd never harm you-"
   "Of course not, I know that."
   "Then provide him with that link to David Webb. It has to be there, Marie."
   "Oh, God, I love him so!" cried the wife, rushing to her feet and racing after her husband-yet not her husband.
   "Was that the right advice, Mo?" asked Conklin.
   "I don't know, Alex. I just don't think he should be alone with his nightmares, none of us should. That's not psychiatry, it's just common sense."
   "Sometimes you sound like a real doctor, you know that?"
   The Algerian section of Paris lies between the tenth and eleventh arrondissements, barely three blocks, where the low buildings are Parisian but the sounds and the smells are Arabic. The insignia of the high church small but emblazoned in gold on its doors, a long black limousine entered this ethnic enclave. It stopped in front of a wood-framed, three-story house, where an old priest got out and walked to the door. He selected a name on the mail plate and pressed the button that rang a bell on the second floor.
   "Oui?" said the metallic voice on the primitive intercom.
   "I am a messenger from the American embassy," answered the visitor in religious garb, his French partially ungrammatical as was all too frequent with Americans. "I can't leave my vehicle, but we have an urgent message for you."
   "I'll be right down," said the French Algerian driver recruited by Charles Casset in Washington. Three minutes later the man emerged from the building and walked out on the short narrow pavement. "What are you dressed like that for?" he asked the messenger who stood by the large automobile, covering the insignia on the rear door.
   "I'm the Catholic chaplain, my son. Our military chargé d'affaires would like a word with you." He opened the door.
   "I'll do many things for you people," laughed the driver as he bent down to look inside the limousine, "but being drafted into your army isn't one of them. ... Yes, sir, what can I do for you?"
   "Where did you take our people?" asked the shadowed figure in the backseat, his features in darkness.
   "What people?" said the Algerian, sudden concern in his voice.
   "The two you picked up at the airport several hours ago. The cripple and his friend."
   "If you're from the embassy and they want you to know, they'll call and tell you, won't they?"
   "You'll tell me!" A third, powerfully built man in a chauffeur's uniform appeared from behind the trunk of the car. He walked rapidly forward, raising his arm and crashing a thick ugly blackjack down on the Algerian's skull. He shoved his victim inside; the old man in the guise of a chaplain climbed in behind him, pulling the door shut as the chauffeur ran around the hood to the front seat. The limousine raced away down the street.
   An hour later on the deserted rue Houdon, a block from Place Pigalle, the Algerian's bruised and bleeding corpse was disgorged from the large automobile. Inside, the figure in shadows addressed his aged, personally ordained priest.
   "Get your car and remain outside the cripple's hotel. Stay awake, for you'll be relieved in the morning and can rest all day. Report any movements and go where he goes. Don't fail me."
   "Never, monseigneur."
   Dimitri Krupkin was not a tall man but he appeared taller than he was, nor was he particularly heavy yet he seemed to possess a much fuller figure than he carried. He had a pleasant if somewhat fleshy face and a generous head held erect; his full eyebrows and well-groomed pepper-and-salt hair and chin beard combined attractively with alert blue eyes and a seemingly perpetual smile, defining a man who enjoyed his life and his work, an intellect behind both. At the moment he was seated in a booth, facing the rear wall, in the all but empty country restaurant in Epernon staring across the table at Alex Conklin, who sat beside the unidentified Bourne and had just explained that he no longer drank alcohol.
   "The world is coming to an end!" exclaimed the Russian in heavily accented English. "You see what happens to a good man in the self-indulgent West? Shame on your parents. They should have stayed with us."
   "I don't think you want to compare the rates of alcoholism in our two countries."
   "Not for a wager of money," said Krupkin, grinning. "Speaking of money, my dear old enemy, how and where am I to be paid according to our agreement last night on the telephone?"
   "How and where do you want to be paid?" asked Jason.
   "Ah ha, you are my benefactor, sir?"
   "I'll be paying you, yes."
   "Hold it!" whispered Conklin, his attention drawn to the restaurant's entrance. He leaned toward the open side of the booth, his hand on his forehead, then quickly moved back as a couple were shown to a table in the corner to the left of the door.
   "What is it?" asked Bourne.
   "I don't know ... I'm not sure."
   "Who came in, Aleksei?"
   "That's just it, I think I should know him but I don't."
   "Where is he seated? In a booth?"
   "No, a table. In the corner beyond the bar. He's with a woman."
   Krupkin moved to the edge of his seat, took out his billfold and removed from its recess a small mirror the size and thickness of a credit card. Cupping it in both hands, he cautiously angled the glass in front of him. "You must be addicted to the society pages of the Paris tabloids," said the Russian, chuckling as he replaced the mirror and returned the billfold to his jacket pocket. "He's with the Italian embassy; that's his wife. Paolo and Davinia something-or-other, with pretensions to nobility, I believe. Strictly corpo diplomatico on the protocol level. They dress up a party quite nicely and they're obviously stinking rich."
   "I don't travel in those circles, but I've seen him somewhere before."
   "Of course you have. He looks like every middle-aged Italian screen star or any one of those vineyard owners who extol the virtues of the Chianti Classico on television commercials."
   "Maybe you're right."
   "I am." Krupkin turned to Bourne. "I shall write out the name of a bank and the number of an account in Geneva." The Soviet reached into his pocket for a pen as he pulled a paper napkin in front of him. He was not able to use either, for a man in his early thirties, dressed in a tight-fitting suit, walked rapidly up to the table.
   "What is it, Sergei?" asked Krupkin.
   "Not you, sir," replied the Soviet aide. "Him," he added, nodding at Bourne.
   "What is it?" repeated Jason.
   "You have been followed. At first we were not sure, for it is an old man with a urinary problem. He rapidly left the car twice to relieve himself, but once settled he used the car telephone and squinted through the windscreen to read the name of the restaurant. That was barely minutes ago."
   "How do you know he was following me?"
   "Because he arrived shortly after you did, and we were here a half hour before that securing the area."
   "Securing the area!" erupted Conklin, looking at Krupkin. "I thought this conference was strictly between us."
   "Dear Aleksei, benevolent Aleksei, who would save me from myself. Can you really believe I'd meet with you without considering my own protection. Not you personally, old friend, but your aggressors in Washington. Can you imagine? A deputy director of the CIA negotiates with me over a man he pretends to think I do not know. A rank amateur ploy."
   "Goddamn you, I never told him!"
   "Oh, dear me, then the error's mine. I apologize, Aleksei."
   "Don't," interrupted Jason firmly. "That old man's from the Jackal-"
   "Carlos!" cried Krupkin, his face flushed, his alert blue eyes now intense, angry. "The Jackal's after you, Aleksei?"
   "No, him," answered Conklin. "Your benefactor."
   "Good God! With what we've picked up, it's all falling into place. So I have the distinct honor to meet the infamous Jason Bourne. A great pleasure, sir! We have the same objective where Carlos is concerned, do we not?"
   "If your men are any good, we may reach that objective before the next hour's up. Come on! Let's get out of here and use the back way, the kitchen, a window, whatever. He's found me and you can bet your ass he's coming out here for me. Only he doesn't know we know that. Let's go!"
   As the three men rose from the table Krupkin gave instructions to his aide. "Have the car brought around to the rear, the service entrance, if there is one, but do it casually, Sergei. No sense of urgency, you understand me?"
   "We can drive half a mile down the road and turn into a pasture that will lead to the rear of the building. We will not be seen by the old man in his car."
   "Very good, Sergei. And have our backup remain in place but be prepared."
   "Of course, comrade." The aide hurried back to the front entrance.
   "A backup?" exploded Alex. "You had a backup?"
   "Please, Aleksei, why quibble? It's your own fault, after all. Even last night on the phone you did not tell me about your conspiracy against your own deputy director."
   "It wasn't a conspiracy, for Christ's sake!"
   "It wasn't exactly a pure rapport between the home office and the field, was it? No, Aleksei Nikolae Konsolikov, you knew you could-shall we say-use me and you did. Never forget, my fine old adversary, you are Russian."
   "Will you two shut up and get out of here?"
   They waited in Krupkin's armor-plated Citroën on the edge of an overgrown field a hundred feet behind the old man's car, the front of the restaurant in clear sight. To Bourne's annoyance, Conklin and the KGB officer reminisced like two aging professionals dissecting each other's strategies in past intelligence operations, pointing out the deficiencies each held to be with the other's. The Soviet backup was a nondescript sedan on the far shoulder of the road diagonally across from the restaurant. Two armed men were ready to leap out, their automatic weapons prepared to fire.
   Suddenly, a Renault station wagon pulled up to the curb in front of the inn. Three couples were inside; all but the driver got out, all laughing, playfully entwining their arms. They walked with abandon toward the entrance as their companion drove the car into the small side parking lot.
   "Stop them," said Jason. "They could be killed."
   "Yes, they could be, Mr. Bourne, but if we stop them we will lose the Jackal."
   Jason stared at the Russian, unable to speak, the harsh winds of anger and confusion clouding his thoughts. He started to utter a protest but could not do so; the words would not come. Then it was too late for words. A dark brown van shot up the road from the highway to Paris and Bourne found his voice.
   "It's the one from the boulevard Lefebvre, the one that got away!"
   "The one from where?" asked Conklin.
   "There was trouble on Lefebvre several days ago," said Krupkin. "An automobile or a truck was blown up. Do you refer to that?"
   "It was a trap. For me. A van, then a limo, and a double for Carlos-a trap. That's the second one; it raced out of a dark side street, I think, and tried to cut us down with firepower."
   "Us?" Alex watched Jason; he saw the undisguised fury in the Chameleon's eyes, the tight, rigid set of his mouth, the slow spreading and contraction of his strong fingers.
   "Bernardine and me," whispered Bourne in reply, suddenly raising his voice. "I want a weapon," he cried. "The gun in my pocket isn't a goddamned weapon!"
   The driver was Krupkin's powerfully built Soviet aide Sergei; he reached across his seat and pulled up a Russian AK-47. He held it over his shoulder as Jason grabbed it.
   A dark brown limousine, its tires skidding on the backcountry road, screamed to a stop in front of the faded, worn canopy; and like trained commandos, two men leaped out of the side door, their faces encased in stocking masks, their hands holding automatic weapons. They raced to the entrance, each spinning his body to either side of the double doors. A third man emerged from the squared vehicle, a balding man in a priest's black clothing. With a gesture of his weapon, the two assault troops spun back toward the doors, their hands on the thick brass knobs. The driver of the van gunned his engine in place.
   "Go!" yelled Bourne. "It's him! It's Carlos!"
   "No!" roared Krupkin. "Wait. It's our trap now, and he must be trapped-inside."
   "For Christ's sake, there are people in there!" countered Jason.
   "All wars have casualties, Mr. Bourne, and in case you don't realize it, this is war. Yours and mine. Yours is far more personal than mine, incidentally."
   Suddenly, there was an earsplitting scream of vengeance from the Jackal as the double doors were crashed back and the terrorists rushed inside, their weapons on automatic fire.
   "Now!" cried Sergei, the ignition started, the accelerator on the floor. The Citroën swung out on the road, rushing toward the van, but in a split half second its progress was derailed. A massive explosion took place on the right. The old man and the nondescript gray car in which he sat was blown apart, sending the Citroën swerving to the left into the ancient post-and-rail fence that bordered the sunken parking lot on the side of the inn. The instant it happened the Jackal's dark brown van, instead of racing forward, lurched backward, jerking to a halt as the driver jumped out of the cab, concealing himself behind it; he had spotted the Soviet backup. As the two Russians ran toward the restaurant the Jackal's driver killed one with a burst from his weapon. The other threw himself into the bordering, sloping grass, watching helplessly as Carlos's driver shot out the tires and the windows of the Soviet vehicle.
   "Get out!" yelled Sergei, pulling Bourne from the seat onto the dirt by the fence, as his stunned superior and Alex Conklin crawled out behind him.
   "Let's go!" cried Jason, gripping the AK-47 and getting to his feet. "That son of a bitch blew up the car by remote."
   "I'll go first!" said the Soviet.
   "Why?"
   "Frankly, I'm younger and stronger-"
   "Shut up!" Bourne raced ahead, zigzagging to draw fire, then plummeting to the ground when it came from the driver of Carlos's van. He raised his weapon in the grass, knowing that the Jackal's man believed his fusillade had been accurate; the head appeared and then was no more as Jason squeezed the trigger.
   The second Russian backup, hearing the death cry from behind the van, rose from the sloping grass and continued toward the restaurant's entrance. From inside came the sound of erratic gunfire, sudden bursts accompanied by screams of panic, followed by additional bursts. A living nightmare of terror and blood was taking place within the confines of a once bucolic country inn. Bourne got to his feet, Sergei at his side; running, they joined the other surviving Soviet aide. At Jason's nod, the Russians pulled back the doors and as one they burst inside.
   The next sixty seconds were as terrifying as the shrieking hell depicted by Munch. A waiter and two of the men who were among the three couples were dead, the waiter and one man sprawled on the floor, their skulls shattered, what was left of their faces lying in blood; the third man was splayed back in the banquette, his eyes wide and glass-dead, his clothes riddled with bullets, rivulets of blood rolling down the fabric. The women were in total shock, alternately moaning and screaming as they kept trying to crawl over the pine walls of the booth. The well-dressed man and wife from the Italian embassy were nowhere in sight.
   Sergei suddenly rushed forward, his weapon on auto fire; in a rear corner of the room he had spotted a figure whom Bourne had not seen. The stocking-faced killer sprang out of the shadows, his machine swinging into position, but before he could exercise his advantage, the Soviet cut him down. ... Another! A body lurching behind the short counter that served as a bar. Was it the Jackal? Jason pivoted into the diagonal wall, crouching, his eyes darting into every recess in the vicinity of the wine racks. He lunged to the base of the bar as the second Russian backup, assessing the situation, ran to the hysterical women, spinning around, his gun swinging back and forth protecting them. The stocking-faced head shot up from behind the counter, his weapon surging out over the wood. Bourne sprang to his feet, gripping the hot barrel with his left hand, his right commanding the AK-47; he fired point-blank into the terrorist's contorted face beyond the silk. It was not Carlos. Where was the Jackal?
   "In there!" shouted Sergei as if he had heard Jason's furious question.
   "Where?"
   "Those doors!"
   It was the country restaurant's kitchen. Both men converged on the swinging doors. Again Bourne nodded, the signal for them to crash inside, but before they could move, both were partially blown back by an explosion from within; a grenade had been set off, with fragments of metal and glass embedded in the doors. The smoke billowed, wafting out into the dining room; the smell was acrid, sickening.
   Silence.
   Jason and Sergei once more approached the kitchen's entrance, and once again they were stopped by a second sudden explosion followed by staccato gunfire, the bullets piercing the thin, louvered panels of the swinging doors.
   Silence.
   Standoff.
   Silence.
   It was too much for the furious, impassioned Chameleon. He cracked the bolt of his AK-47, pulled the selective lever and then the trigger for auto fire, and crashed the doors open, lunging for the floor.
   Silence.
   Another scene from another hell. A section of the outside wall had been blown away, the obese owner and his chef, still wearing his toque, were dead, corpses pinned against the lower shelves of the kitchen, blood streaming across and down the wood.
   Bourne slowly rose to his feet, his legs in agony, every nerve in his body frayed, the edge of hysteria not far away. As if in a trance, he looked around through the smoke and the debris, his eyes finally settling on a large, ominous fragment of brown butcher's paper nailed to the wall with a heavy cleaver. He approached it and, yanking out the cleaver, read the words printed in a black butcher's pencil:
   The trees of Tannenbaum will burn and children will be the kindling. Sleep well, Jason Bourne.
   The mirrors of his life were shattered into a thousand pieces of glass. There was nothing else to do but scream.