The Bourne ultimatum

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 gar?on 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 gar?on, 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 chateau 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 f*cking 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, Fran?ois; 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 Fran?ois. “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, Fran?ois. 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, Fran?ois?”
“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 Fran?ois, 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!”