The Bourne ultimatum

23

“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 f*ckin’ 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 Eur’pean, you know? She don’t speak so good English, but she’s grateful. ... Great with the kids, great with me, and I still get excited when I see her. Not like these f*ckin’ 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, a*shole, 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.”
f f f
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 fran?ais, 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.

Fran?ois 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.”
“Fran?ois?”
“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 f*ck 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.”