Page 22 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  “Mon Dieu,” whispered the Frenchman. “The old men of Paris, the Jackal’s army! Too many questions!” Fontaine walked rapidly to the nurse’s bedroom door and opened it. With the swiftness developed over a lifetime of practice, impaired only slightly by his years, he began methodically to tear apart the woman’s room—suitcase, closet, clothes, pillows, mattress, bureau, dressing table, writing desk … the desk. A locked drawer in the desk—a locked drawer in the outer room. The “equipment.” Nothing mattered now! His woman was gone and there were too many questions!

  A heavy lamp on the desk with a thick brass base—he picked it up, pulling out the cord, and smashed it into the drawer. Again and again and again until the wood splintered, shattering the recess that held the tiny vertical latch. He yanked the drawer open and stared in equal parts of horror and comprehension at what he saw.

  Next to each other in a cushioned plastic case were two hypodermic needles, their vials filled with an identical yellowish serum. He did not have to know the chemical compounds; there were too many beyond his knowledge that would be effective. Liquid death in the veins.

  Nor did he have to be told for whom they were intended. Côte à côte dans le lit. Two bodies beside each other in bed. He and his woman in a pact of final deliverance. How thoroughly had the monseigneur thought everything out! Himself dead! One dead old man from the Jackal’s army of old men had outwitted all the security procedures, killing and mutilating those dearest to Carlos’s ultimate enemy, Jason Bourne. And, naturally, behind that brilliant manipulation was the Jackal himself!

  Ce n’est pas le contrat! Myself, yes, but not my woman! You promised me!

  The nurse. The angel not of mercy but of death! The man known on Tranquility Isle as Jean Pierre Fontaine walked as fast as he could into the other room. To his equipment.

  The huge silver racing craft with its two enormous engines crashed through the swells as often above the waves as in them. On the short low bridge, John St. Jacques maneuvered the drug boat through the dangerous reefs he knew by summoned memory, aided by the powerful searchlight that lit up the turbulent waters, now twenty, now two hundred feet in front of the bow. He kept screaming into his radio, the microphone weaving in front of his drenched face, hoping against all logic to raise someone on Tranquility.

  He was within three miles of the island, a shrubbed volcanic intrusion on the water his landmark. Tranquility Isle was in kilometers much nearer Plymouth than to Blackburne Airport, and if one knew the shoals, not much longer to reach in a drug boat than in a seaplane, which had to bank east out of Blackburne to catch the prevailing west winds in order to land on the sea. Johnny was not sure why these calculations kept interfering with his concentration except that somehow they made him feel better, that he was doing the best he could—Damn it! Why was it always the best he could do rather than simply the best? He couldn’t louse up anymore, not now, not tonight! Christ, he owed everything to Mare and David! Maybe even more to the crazy bastard who was his brother-in-law than to his own sister. David, wild-nuts David, a man he sometimes wondered if Marie ever knew existed!

  “You back off, little Bro, I’ll take care of this.”

  “You can’t, David, I did it. I killed them!”

  “I said ‘Back off.’ ”

  “I asked for your help, not for you to be me!”

  “But you see I am you. I would have done the same thing and that makes me you in my eyes.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “It’s part of it. Someday I may teach you how to kill cleanly, in the dark. In the meantime, listen to the lawyers.”

  “Suppose they lose?”

  “I’ll get you out. I’ll get you away.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll kill again.”

  “I can’t believe you! A teacher, a scholar—I don’t believe you, I don’t want to believe you—you’re my sister’s husband.”

  “Then don’t believe me, Johnny. And forget everything I’ve said, and never tell your sister I said it.”

  “It’s that other person inside of you, isn’t it?”

  “You’re very dear to Marie.”

  “That’s no answer! Here, now, you’re Bourne, aren’t you? Jason Bourne!”

  “We’ll never, ever, discuss this conversation, Johnny. Do you understand me?”

  No, he had never understood, thought St. Jacques, as the swirling winds and the cracks of lightning seemed to envelop the boat. Even when Marie and David appealed to his rapidly disintegrating ego by suggesting he could build a new life for himself in the islands. Seed money, they had said; build us a house and then see where you want to go from there. Within limits, we’ll back you. Why would they do that? Why did they?

  It was not “they,” it was he. Jason Bourne.

  Johnny St. Jacques understood the other morning when he picked up the phone by the pool and was told by an island pilot that someone had been asking questions at the airport about a woman and two children.

  Someday I may teach you how to kill cleanly, in the dark. Jason Bourne.

  Lights! He saw the beach lights of Tranquility. He was less than a mile from the shore!

  The rain pounded down against the old Frenchman, the blasts of wind throwing him off balance as he made his way up the path toward Villa Fourteen. He angled his head against the elements, squinting, wiping his face with his left hand, his right gripping the weapon, a gun lengthened by the extension of the pocked cylinder that was its silencer. He held the pistol behind him as he had done years ago racing along railroad tracks, sticks of dynamite in one hand, a German Luger in the other, prepared to drop both at the appearance of Nazi patrols.

  Whoever they were on the path above, they were no less than the Boche in his mind. All were Boche! He had been subservient to others long enough! His woman was gone; he would be his own man now, for there was nothing left but his own decisions, his own feelings, his own very private sense of what was right and what was wrong.… And the Jackal was wrong! The apostle of Carlos could accept the killing of the woman; it was a debt he could rationalize, but not the children, and certainly not the mutilations. Those acts were against God, and he and his woman were about to face Him; there had to be certain ameliorating circumstances.

  Stop the angel of death! What could she be doing? What did the fire she talked about mean?… Then he saw it—a huge burst of flame through the hedges of Villa Fourteen. In a window! The same window that had to be the bedroom of the luxurious pink cottage.

  Fontaine reached the flagstone walk that led to the front door as a bolt of lightning shook the ground under him. He fell to the earth, then struggled to his knees, crawling to the pink porch, its fluttering overhead light outlining the door. No amount of twisting or pulling or shoving could release the latch, so he angled his pistol up, squeezed the trigger twice and blew the lock apart. He pushed himself to his feet and went inside.

  Inside. The screams came from beyond the door of the master bedroom. The old Frenchman lurched toward it, his legs unsteady, his weapon wavering in his right hand. With what strength he had left, he kicked the door open and observed a scene that he knew had to come from hell.

  The nurse, with the old man’s head in a metal leash, was forcing her victim down into a raging kerosene fire on the floor.

  “Arrêtez!” screamed the man called Jean Pierre Fontaine. “Assez! Maintenant!”

  Through the rising, spreading flames, shots rang out and bodies fell.

  The lights of Tranquility’s beach drew nearer as John St. Jacques kept yelling into the microphone: “It’s me! It’s Saint Jay coming in! Don’t shoot!”

  But the sleek silver drug boat was greeted by the staccato gunfire of automatic weapons. St. Jacques dived to the deck and kept shouting. “I’m coming in—I’m beaching. Hold your goddamned fire!”

  “Is that you, mon?” came a panicked voice over the radio.

  “You want to get paid next week?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Saint Jay!” The loudspeakers on the

beach erratically interrupted the winds and the thunder out of Basse-Terre. “Everyone down on the beach, stop shooting your guns! The bo-att is okay, mon! It is our boss mon, Mr. Saint Jay!”

  The drug boat shot out of the water and onto the dark sand, its engines screaming, the blades instantly embedded, the pointed hull cracking under the impact. St. Jacques leaped up from his defensive fetal position and vaulted over the gunwale. “Villa Twenty!” he roared, racing through the downpour across the beach to the stone steps that led to the path. “All you men, get there!”

  As he ran up the hard, rain-splattered staircase he suddenly gasped, his personal galaxy exploding into a thousand blinding stars of fire. Gunshots! One after another. On the east wing of the path! His legs cycled faster and faster, leaping over two and three steps at a time; he reached the path and like a man possessed raced up the path toward Villa Twenty, snapping his head to the right in furious confusion that only added to his panic. People—men and woman from his staff—were clustered around the doorway of Villa Fourteen!… Who was there?… My God, the judge!

  His lungs bursting, every muscle and tendon in his legs stretched to the breaking point, St. Jacques reached his sister’s house. He crashed through the gate, and ran to the door, hurling his body against it and bursting through to the room inside. Eyes bulging first in horror, then in unmeasurable pain, he fell to his knees, screaming. On the white wall with terrible clarity were the words scrawled in dark red:

  Jason Bourne, brother of the Jackal.

  14

  “Johnny! Johnny, stop it!” His sister’s voice crashed into his ear as she cradled his head in one arm, the other extended above him, her free hand gripping his hair, nearly pulling it out of his skull. “Can you hear me? We’re all right, Bro! The children are in another villa—we’re fine!”

  The faces above him and around him came slowly into focus. Among them were the two old men, one from Boston, the other from Paris. “There they are!” screamed St. Jacques, lurching up but stopped by Marie, who fell across him. “I’ll kill the bastards!”

  “No!” roared his sister, holding him, helped by a guard whose strong black hands gripped her brother’s shoulders. “At this moment they’re two of the best friends we have.”

  “You don’t know who they are!” cried St. Jacques, trying to free himself.

  “Yes, we do,” broke in Marie, lowering her voice, her lips next to his ear. “Enough to know they can lead us to the Jackal—”

  “They work for the Jackal!”

  “One did,” said the sister. “The other never heard of Carlos.”

  “You don’t understand!” whispered St. Jacques. “They’re old men—‘the old men of Paris,’ the Jackal’s army! Conklin reached me in Plymouth and explained … they’re killers!”

  “Again, one was but he’s not anymore; he has nothing to kill for now. The other … well, the other’s a mistake, a stupid, outrageous mistake, but that’s all he is, and thank God for it—for him.”

  “It’s all crazy …!”

  “It’s crazy,” agreed Marie, nodding to the guard to help her brother up. “Come on, Johnny, we have things to talk about.”

  The storm had blown away like a violent, unwanted intruder racing off into the night leaving behind the carnage of its rage. The early morning light broke over the eastern horizon, slowly revealing through the mists the blue-green out islands of Montserrat. The first boats cautiously, dolefully lumbered out to the favored fishing grounds, for the catch of the day meant one more day’s survival. Marie, her brother and the two old men were around a table on the balcony of an unoccupied villa. Over coffee, they had been talking for the better part of an hour, treating each point of horror coldly, dissecting facts without feeling. The aged false hero of France had been assured that all proper arrangements would be made for his woman once phone service had been restored to the big island. If it was possible, he wanted her to be buried in the islands; she would understand. There was nothing left for her in France but the ignominy of a tawdry grave. If it was possible—

  “It’s possible,” said St. Jacques. “Because of you my sister’s alive.”

  “Because of me, young man, she might have died.”

  “Would you have killed me?” asked Marie, studying the old Frenchman.

  “Certainly not after I saw what Carlos had planned for me and my woman. He had broken the contract, not I.”

  “Before then.”

  “When I had not yet seen the needles, understood what was all too obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s difficult to answer; a contract’s a contract. Still, my woman was dead, and a part of her dying was because she sensed that a terrible thing had been demanded of me. To go through with that demand would deny that aspect of her death, don’t you see? Yet again, even in her death, the monseigneur could not be totally denied—he had made possible years of relative happiness that would have been impossible without him.… I simply don’t know. I might have reasoned that I owed him your life—your death—but certainly not the children’s … and most certainly not the rest of it.”

  “Rest of what?” asked St. Jacques.

  “It’s best not to inquire.”

  “I think you would have killed me,” said Marie.

  “I tell you, I simply don’t know. There was nothing personal. You were not a person to me, you were simply an event that was part of a business arrangement.… Still, as I say, my woman was gone, and I’m an old man with limited time before me. Perhaps a look in your eyes or a plea for your children—who knows, I might have turned the pistol on myself. Then again, I might not have.”

  “Jesus, you are a killer,” said the brother quietly.

  “I am many things, monsieur. I don’t ask forgiveness in this world; the other’s another question. There were always circumstances—”

  “Gallic logic,” remarked Brendan Patrick Pierre Prefontaine, former judge of the first circuit court in Boston, as he absently touched the raw tender skin of his neck below his singed white hair. “Thank heavens I never had to argue before les tribunals; neither side is ever actually wrong.” The disbarred attorney chuckled. “You see before you a felon, justly tried and justly convicted. The only exculpatory aspect of my crimes is that I was caught and so many others were not and are not.”

  “Perhaps we are related, after all, Monsieur le Juge.”

  “By comparison, sir, my life is far closer to that of St. Thomas Aquinas—”

  “Blackmail,” interrupted Marie.

  “No, actually the charge was malfeasance. Accepting remunerations for favorable decisions, that sort of thing.… My God, we’re hound’s-tooth Boston! In New York City it’s standard procedure: Leave your money with the bailiff, enough for everyone.”

  “I’m not referring to Boston, I’m talking about why you’re here. It’s blackmail.”

  “That’s an oversimplification but essentially correct. As I told you, the man who paid me to find out where you’d gone also paid me an additional large sum of money to keep the information to myself. Under the circumstances, and because I have no pressing schedule of appointments, I thought it logical to pursue the inquiry. After all, if the little I knew brought so much, how much more might come to me if I learned a little more?”

  “You talk of Gallic logic, monsieur?” inserted the Frenchman.

  “It’s simple interrogatory progression,” replied the former judge, briefly glancing at Jean Pierre before turning back to Marie. “However, my dear, I may have glossed over an item that was extremely helpful in negotiations with my client. To put it plainly, your identity was being withheld and protected by the government. It was a strong point that frightened a very strong and influential man.”

  “I want his name,” said Marie.

  “Then I must have protection, too,” rejoined Prefontaine.

  “You’ll have it—”

  “And perhaps something more,” continued the old disbarred attorney. “My client has no idea I came

here, no knowledge of what’s happened, all of which might fuel the fires of his largess if I described what I’ve experienced and observed. He’d be frightened out of his mind even to be associated with such events. Also, considering the fact that I was nearly killed by that Teutonic Amazon, I really deserve more.”

  “Am I then to be rewarded for saving your life, monsieur?”

  “If I had anything of value—other than my legal expertise, which is yours—I’d happily share it. If I’m given anything, that still holds, Cousin.”

  “Merci bien, Cousin.”

  “D’accord, mon ami, but never let the Irish nuns hear us.”

  “You don’t look like a poor man, Judge,” said John St. Jacques.

  “Then appearances are as deceiving as a long-forgotten title you so generously use.… I should add that my wants are not extravagant, for there’s no one but myself, and my creature comforts do not require luxury.”

  “You’ve lost your woman, too, then?”

  “Not that it’s any of your damn business, but my wife left me twenty-nine years ago, and my thirty-eight-year-old son, now a successful attorney on Wall Street, uses her name and when questioned by curious people tells them he never knew me. I haven’t seen him since he was ten; it was not in his interest, you understand.”

  “Quelle tristesse.”

  “Quel bullshit, Cousin. That boy got his brains from me, not from the airhead who bore him.… However, we stray. My French pureblood here has his own reasons—obviously based on betrayal—for cooperating with you. I have equally strong reasons for wanting to help you, too, but I must also consider myself. My aged new friend can go back and live what’s left of his life in Paris, whereas I have no place to go but Boston and the few opportunities I’ve developed over the years to eke out a living. Therefore my deep-seated motives for wanting to help must themselves take a backseat. With what I know now I wouldn’t last five minutes in the streets of Boston.”