Page 30 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  Suddenly there were lights, colored lights spilling over the wall. They had reached the path to the chapel, the red and blue floodlights that lit up the entrance to Tranquility Inn’s sealed-off sanctuary. It was the last destination before the return route back to Fontaine’s villa, and one they all agreed was designed more to permit the old Frenchman time to catch his breath than for any other purpose. St. Jacques had stationed a guard there to prevent entrance into the demolished chapel. There would be no contact here. Then Bourne heard the words over the radio—the words that would send the false nurse racing away from her false charge.

  “Get away from me!” yelled Fontaine. “I don’t like you. Where is our regular nurse? What have you done with her?”

  Up ahead, the two commandos were side by side, crouching below the wall. They turned and looked at Jason, their expressions in the eerie wash of colored lights telling him what he knew only too well. From that moment on, all decisions were his; they had led him, escorted him, to his enemy. The rest was up to him.

  The unexpected rarely disturbed Bourne; it did now. Had Fontaine made a mistake? Had the old man forgotten about the inn’s guard and erroneously presumed he was the Jackal’s contact? In his aged eyes had an understandably surprised reaction on the guard’s part been misinterpreted as an approach? Anything was possible, but considering the Frenchman’s background—the life of a survivor—and the state of his alert mind, such a mistake was not realistic.

  Then the possibility of another reality came into focus and it was sickening. Had the guard been killed or bribed, replaced by another? Carlos was a master of the turn-around. It was said he had fulfilled a contract on the assassination of Anwar Sadat without firing a weapon, by merely replacing the Egyptian president’s security detail with inexperienced recruits—money dispersed in Cairo returned a hundredfold by the anti-Israel brotherhoods in the Middle East. If it were true, the exercise on Tranquility Isle was child’s play.

  Jason rose to his feet, gripped the top of the coastal wall, and slowly, painfully, his neck causing agony, pulled himself up over the ledge, again slowly, inch by inch, sending one arm after the other across the surface to grab the opposing edge for support. What he saw stunned him!

  Fontaine was immobile, his mouth gaped in shock, his wide eyes disbelieving, as another old man in a tan gabardine suit approached him and threw his arms around the aged hero of France. Fontaine pushed the man away in panic and bewilderment. The words erupted out of the radio in Bourne’s pocket. “Claude! Quelle secousse! Vous êtes ici!”

  The ancient friend replied in a tremulous voice, speaking French. “It is a privilege our monseigneur permitted me. To see for a final time my sister, and to give comfort to my friend, her husband. I am here and I am with you!”

  “With me? He brought you here? But, of course, he did!”

  “I am to take you to him. The great man wishes to speak with you.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing—what you’ve done?”

  “I am with you, with her. What else matters?”

  “She’s dead! She took her own life last night! He intended to kill us both.”

  Shut off your radio! screamed Bourne in the silence of his thoughts. Kill the radio! It was too late. The left door of the chapel opened and the silhouetted figure of a man walked out into the floodlit corridor of colored lights. He was young, muscular and blond, with blunt features and rigid posture. Was the Jackal training someone else to take his place?

  “Come with me, please,” said the blond man, his French gentle but icily commanding. “You,” he added, addressing the old man in the tan gabardine suit. “Stay where you are. At the slightest sound, fire your gun.… Take it out. Hold it in your hand.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  Jason watched helplessly as Fontaine was escorted through the door of the chapel. From the pocket of his jacket there was an eruption of static followed by a snap; the Frenchman’s radio had been found and destroyed. Yet something was wrong, off-center, out of balance—or perhaps too symmetrical. It made no sense for Carlos to use the location of a failed trap a second time, no sense at all! The appearance of the brother of Fontaine’s wife was an exceptional move, worthy of the Jackal, a truly unexpected move within the swirling winds of confusion, but not this, not again Tranquility Inn’s superfluous chapel. It was too orderly, too repetitive, too obvious. Wrong.

  And therefore right? considered Bourne. Was it the illogical logic of the assassin who had eluded a hundred special branches of the international intelligence community for nearly thirty years? “He wouldn’t do that—it’s crazy!” “… Oh, yes, he might because he knows we think it’s crazy.” Was the Jackal in the chapel or wasn’t he? If not, where was he? Where had he set his trap?

  The lethal chess game was not only supremely intricate, it was sublimely intimate. Others might die, but only one of them would live. It was the only way it could end. Death to the seller of death or death to the challenger, one seeking the preservation of a legend, the other seeking the preservation of his family and himself. Carlos had the advantage; ultimately he would risk everything, for, as Fontaine revealed, he was a dying man and he did not care. Bourne had everything to live for, a middle-aged hunter whose life was indelibly marked, split in two by the death of a vaguely remembered wife and children long ago in far-off Cambodia. It could not, would not, happen again!

  Jason slid down off the coastal wall to the slanting precipice at its base. He crawled forward to the two former commandos and whispered, “They’ve taken Fontaine inside.”

  “Where is the guard?” asked the man nearest Bourne, confusion and anger in his whisper. “I myself placed him here with specific instructions. No one was permitted inside. He was to be on the radio the instant he saw anyone!”

  “Then I’m afraid he didn’t see him.”

  “Who?”

  “A blond man who speaks French.”

  Both commandos whipped their heads toward each other, exchanging glances as the second guard instantly looked at Jason and spoke quietly. “Describe him, please,” he said.

  “Medium height, large chest and shoulders—”

  “Enough,” interrupted the first guard. “Our man saw him, sir. He is third provost of the government police, an officer who speaks several languages and is chief of drug investigations.”

  “But why is he here, mon?” the second commando asked his colleague. “Mr. Saint Jay said the Crown police are not told everything, they are not part of us.”

  “Sir Henry, mon. He has Crown boats, six or seven, running back and forth with orders to stop anyone leaving Tranquility. They are drug boats, mon. Sir Henry calls it a patrol exercise, so naturally the chief of investigations must be—” The lilting whisper of the West Indian trailed off in midsentence as he looked at his companion. “… Then why isn’t he out on the water, mon? On the lead boat, mon?”

  “Do you like him?” asked Bourne instinctively, surprising himself by his own question. “I mean, do you respect him? I could be wrong but I seem to sense something—”

  “You are not wrong, sir,” answered the first guard, interrupting. “The provost is a cruel man and he doesn’t like the ‘Punjabis,’ as he calls us. He’s very quick to accuse us, and many have lost work because of his rash accusations.”

  “Why don’t you complain, get rid of him? The British will listen to you.”

  “The Crown governor will not, sir,” explained the second guard. “He’s very partial to his strict chief of narcotics. They are good friends and often go out after the big fish together.”

  “I see.” Jason did see and was suddenly alarmed, very alarmed. “Saint Jay told me there used to be a path behind the chapel. He said it might be overgrown, but he thought it was still there.”

  “It is,” confirmed the first commando. “The help still use it to go down to the water on their off times.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Thirty-five, forty meters. It leads to an incline where steps hav

e been cut out of the rocks that take one down to the beach.”

  “Which of you is faster?” asked Bourne, reaching into his pocket and taking out the reel of fishing line.

  “I am.”

  “I am!”

  “I choose you,” said Jason, nodding his head at the shorter first guard, handing him the reel. “Go down on the border of that path and wherever you can, string this line across it, tying it to limbs or trunks or the strongest branches you can find. You mustn’t be seen, so be alert, see in the dark.”

  “Is no problem, mon!”

  “Have you got a knife?”

  “Do I have eyes?”

  “Good. Give me your Uzi. Hurry!”

  The guard scrambled away along the vine-tangled precipice and disappeared into the dense foliage beyond. The second Royal Commando spoke. “In truth, sir, I am much faster, for my legs are much longer.”

  “Which is why I chose him and I suspect you know it. Long legs are no advantage here, only an impediment, which I happen to know. Also, he’s much shorter and less likely to be spotted.”

  “The smaller ones always get the better assignments. They parade us up front and put us in boxing rings with rules we don’t understand, but the small soldiers get the plumbies.”

  “ ‘Plumbies’? The better jobs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The most dangerous jobs?”

  “Yes, mon!”

  “Live with it, big fella.”

  “What do we do now, sir?”

  Bourne looked above at the wall and the soft wash of colored lights. “It’s called the waiting game—no love songs implied, only the hatred that comes from wanting to live when others want to kill you. There’s nothing quite like it because you can’t do anything. All you can do is think about what the enemy may or may not be doing, and whether he’s thought of something you haven’t considered. As somebody once said, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

  “Where, mon?”

  “Nothing. It isn’t true.”

  Suddenly, filling the air above in chilling horror, came a prolonged excruciating scream, followed by words shrieked in pain. “Non, non! Vous êtes monstrueux!… Arrêtez, arrêtez, je vous supplie!”

  “Now!” cried Jason, slinging the strap of his Uzi over his shoulder as he leaped onto the wall, gripping the edge, pulling himself up as the blood poured out of his neck. He could not get up! He could not get over! Then strong hands pulled him and he fell over the top of the wall. “The lights!” he shouted. “Shoot them out!”

  The tall commando’s Uzi blazing, the lines of floodlights exploded in the ground on both sides of the chapel’s path. Again, strong black hands pulled him to his feet in the new darkness. And then a single shaft of yellow appeared, roving swiftly in all directions; it was a powerful halogen flashlight in the commando’s left hand. The figure of a blood-drenched old man in a tan gabardine suit lay curled up in the path, his throat slit.

  “Stop! In the name of almighty God, stop where you are!” came Fontaine’s voice from inside the chapel, the open half door revealing the flickering light of the electric candles. They approached the entrance, automatic weapons leveled, prepared for continuous fire … but not prepared for what they saw. Bourne closed his eyes, the sight was too painful. Old Fontaine, like young Ishmael, was sprawled over the lectern on the raised platform beneath the blown-out, stained-glass windows of the left wall, his face running with blood where he had been slashed, and attached to his body were thin cables that led to various black boxes on both sides of the chapel.

  “Go back!” screamed Fontaine. “Run, you fools! I’m wired—”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  “Mourn not for me, Monsieur le Caméléon. I gladly join my woman! This world is too ugly even for me. It is no longer amusing. Run! The charge will go off—they are watching!”

  “You, mon! Now!” roared the second commando, grabbing Jason’s jacket and racing him to the wall, holding Bourne in his arms as they plummeted over the stone surface into the thick foliage.

  The explosion was massive, blinding and deafening. It was as if this small corner of the small island had been taken out by a heat-seeking nuclear missile. Flames erupted into the night sky, but the burning mass was quickly diffused in the still wind to fiery rubble.

  “The path!” shouted Jason, in a hoarse whisper, as he crawled to his feet in the sloping brush. “Get to the path!”

  “You’re in bad condition, mon—”

  “I’ll take care of me, you take care of you!”

  “I believe I’ve taken care of both of us.”

  “So you’ve got a fucking medal and I’ll add a lot of money to it. Now, get us up to the path!”

  Pulling, pushing, and finally with Bourne’s feet grinding like a machine out of control, the two men reached the border of the path thirty feet behind the smoldering ruins of the chapel. They crept into the weeds and within seconds the first commando found them. “They’re in the south palms,” he said breathlessly. “They wait until the smoke has cleared to see if anyone is alive, but they cannot stay long.”

  “You were there?” asked Jason. “With them?”

  “No problem, mon, I told you, sir.”

  “What’s happening? How many are there?”

  “There were four, sir. I killed the man whose place I assumed. He was black, so it made no matter in appearance with the darkness. It was quick and silent. The throat.”

  “Who’s left?”

  “ ’Serrat’s chief of narcotics, of course, and two others—”

  “Describe them!”

  “I could not see clearly, but one I think was another black man, tall and without much hair. The third I could not see at all, for he—or she—was wearing strange clothes, with cloth over the head like a woman’s sun hat or insect veil.”

  “A woman?”

  “It is possible, sir.”

  “A woman …? They’ve got to get out of there—he’s got to get out of there!”

  “Very soon they will run to this path and race down to the beach, where they will hide in the woods of the cove until a boat comes for them. They have no choice. They cannot go back to the inn, for strangers are seen instantly, and even though we are far away and the steel band is loud, the explosion was certainly heard by the guards posted outside. They will report it.”

  “Listen to me,” said Bourne, his voice hoarse, tense. “One of those three people is the man I want, and I want him for myself! So hold your fire because I’ll know him when I see him. I don’t give a damn about the others; they can be flushed out of that cove later.”

  There was a sudden burst of gunfire from the tropical forest accompanied by screams from the once floodlit corridor beyond the ruins of the chapel. Then one after another the figures raced out of the tangled brush into the path. The first to be caught was the blond-haired police officer from Montserrat, the waist-high invisible fishing line tripping him as he fell into the dirt, breaking the thin, taut string. The second man, slender, tall, dark-featured, with only a fringe of hair on his bald head, was hard upon the first, pulling him to his feet, sight or instinct making the second killer wield his automatic weapon in slashing arcs, cutting the impeding lines across the path to the ledge that led down to the beach. The third figure appeared. It was not a woman. It was a man, in the robes of a monk. A priest. It was he. The Jackal!

  Bourne rose to his feet and stumbled out of the brush into the path, the Uzi in his hands; the victory was his, his freedom his, his family his! As the robed figure reached the top of the primitive rock-hewn staircase, Jason pressed his trigger finger, holding it in place, the fusillade of bullets exploding out of the automatic weapon.

  The monk arched in silhouette, then fell, his body tumbling, rolling, sprawling down the steps carved out of volcanic rock, finally lurching over the edge and plummeting to the sand below. Bourne raced down the awkward, irregular stone staircase, the two commandos behind him. He reached the beach, raced over to the corpse, and pulle

d the drenched hood away from the face. In horror, he looked at the black features of Samuel, the brother priest of Tranquility Isle, the Judas who had sold his soul to the Jackal for thirty pieces of silver.

  Suddenly, in the distance, there was the roar of powerful dual engines as a huge speedboat lurched out of a shadowed section of the cove and sped for a break in the reefs. The beam of a searchlight shot out, firing the barriers of rock protruding above the choppy black water, its wash illuminating the fluttering ensign of the government’s drug fleet. Carlos!… The Jackal was no chameleon, but he had changed! He had aged, grown thinner and bald—he was not the sharp, broad, full-headed muscular image of Jason’s memory. Only the indistinct dark Latin features remained, the face and the unfamiliar expanse of bare skin above burned by the sun. He was gone!

  The boat’s motors screamed in unison as the craft breached a precarious opening in the reef and burst out into open water. Then the words in heavily accented English, metallically spewing from the distant loudspeaker, echoed within the tropical cove.

  “Paris, Jason Bourne! Paris, if you dare! Or shall it be a certain minor university in Maine, Dr. Webb?”

  Bourne, his neck wound ripped open, collapsed in the lapping waves, his blood trickling into the sea.

  18

  Steven DeSole, keeper of the deepest secrets for the Central Intelligence Agency, forced his overweight frame out of the driver’s seat. He stood in the deserted parking lot of the small shopping center in Annapolis, Maryland, where the only source of light was the storefront neons of a closed gas station, with a large German shepherd sleeping in the window. DeSole adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses and squinted at his watch, barely able to see the radium hands. As near as he could determine, it was between 3:15 and 3:20 in the morning, which meant he was early and that was good. He had to adjust his thoughts; he was unable to do so while driving, as his severe night blindness necessitated complete concentration on the road, and hiring a taxi or a driver was out of the question.