Page 46 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  “I am,” answered Bourne. “If this works out the way I think it will, you can add to your account in Geneva.”

  “I do not do what I’m doing for that, my friend. It has never been a consideration.”

  “I know, but as long as we’re passing out francs like we’re printing them in the garage, why shouldn’t you get a fair share?”

  “I can’t argue with that, either.”

  “An hour,” announced Jason. “Forty-three minutes now, to be exact.”

  “For what?”

  “To find out if it’s real, actually real.” Bourne fell on the bed, his arms behind his head on the pillow, his eyes alive. “Write this down, François.” Jason recited the telephone number given him by Santos. “Buy, bribe, or threaten every high-level contact you’ve ever had in the Paris telephone service, but get me the location of that number.”

  “It’s not such an expensive request—”

  “Yes, it is,” countered Bourne. “He’s got it guarded, inviolate; he wouldn’t do it any other way. Only four people in his entire network have it.”

  “Then, perhaps, we do not go high-level, but, instead, far lower to the ground, underground actually. Into the tunnels of the telephone service beneath the streets.”

  Jason snapped his head over at Bernardine. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Why should you? You are not Deuxième. The technicians are the source, not the bureaucrats behind the desks.… I know several. I will find one and give him a quiet call at home later tonight—”

  “Tonight?” broke in Bourne, raising himself off the bed.

  “It will cost a thousand francs or so, but you’ll get the location of the telephone.”

  “I can’t wait until later tonight.”

  “Then you add a risk by trying to reach such a man at work. These men are monitored; no one trusts anyone in the telephone service. It’s the Socialists’ paradox: Give its laboring forces responsibility but no individual authority.”

  “Hold it!” said Jason from the bed. “You have the home phone numbers, right?”

  “They’re in the book, yes. These people don’t keep private listings.”

  “Have someone’s wife call. An emergency. Someone’s got to get home.”

  Bernardine nodded his head. “Not bad, my friend. Not bad at all.”

  The minutes turned into quarter hours as the retired Deuxième officer went to work, unctuously, with promises of reward for the wives of telephone technicians, if they would do what he asked them to do. Two hung up on him, three turned him down with epithets born of the suspicious Paris curbsides; but the sixth, amid obscenities, declared, “Why not?” As long as the rodent she had married understood that the money was hers.

  The hour was over, and Jason left the hotel, walking slowly, deliberately, down the pavement, crossing four streets until he saw a public phone on the Quai Voltaire by the Seine. A blanket of darkness was slowly floating down over Paris, the boats on the river and the bridges dotted with lights. As he approached the red kiosk he breathed steadily, inhaling deeply, exercising a control over himself that he never thought possible. He was about to place the most important phone call of his life, but he could not let the Jackal know that, if, indeed, it was the Jackal. He went inside, inserted the coin and dialed.

  “Yes?” It was a woman’s voice, the French oui sharp and harsh. A Parisienne.

  “Blackbirds circle in the sky,” said Bourne, repeating Santos’s words in French. “They make a great deal of noise, all but one. He is silent.”

  “Where do you call from?”

  “Here in Paris, but I am not from Paris.”

  “From where, then?”

  “Where the winters are far colder,” answered Jason, feeling the moisture on his hairline. Control. Control! “It is urgent that I reach a blackbird.”

  The line was suddenly filled with silence, a sonic void, and Bourne stopped breathing. Then came the voice, low, steady, and as hollow as the previous silence. “We speak to a Muscovite?”

  The Jackal! It was the Jackal! The smooth, swift French could not hide the Latino trace. “I did not say that,” answered Bourne; his own French dialect was one he employed frequently, with the guttural tinge of Gascony. “I merely said the winters were colder than Paris.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Someone who is considered by someone who knows you sufficiently impressive to be given this number along with the proper words to go with it. I can offer you the contract of your career, of your life. The fee is immaterial—name your own—but those who pay are among the most powerful men in the United States. They control much of American industry, as well as that country’s financial institutions, and have direct access to the nerve centers of the government.”

  “This is also a very strange call. Very unorthodox.”

  “If you’re not interested, I’ll forget this number and go elsewhere. I’m merely the broker. A simple yes or no will suffice.”

  “I do not commit to things I know nothing about, to people I never heard of.”

  “You’d recognize their positions, if I were at liberty to reveal them, believe that. However, I’m not seeking a commitment, only your interest at this point. If the answer is yes, I can reveal more. If it’s no, well, I tried, but am forced to go elsewhere. The newspapers say he was in Brussels only yesterday. I’ll find him.” There was a short, sharp intake of breath at the mention of Brussels and the unspoken Jason Bourne. “Yes or no, blackbird?”

  Silence. Finally the Jackal spoke. “Call me back in two hours,” he ordered, hanging up the phone.

  It was done! Jason leaned against the pay phone, the sweat pouring down his face and breaking out on his neck. The Pont-Royal. He had to get back to Bernardine!

  “It was Carlos!” he announced, closing the door and crossing directly to the bedside phone while taking Santos’s card out of his pocket. He dialed; in seconds, he spoke. “The bird’s confirmed,” he said. “Give me a name, any name.” The pause was brief. “I’ve got it. The merchandise will be left with the concierge. It’ll be locked and taped; count it and send my passports back to me. Have your best boy pick everything up and call off the dogs. They could lead a blackbird to you.” Jason hung up and turned to Bernardine.

  “The telephone number is in the fifteenth arrondissement,” said the Deuxième veteran. “Our man knew that, or at least assumed it when I gave it to him.”

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “Go back into the tunnels and refine things further.”

  “Will he call us here?”

  “Fortunately, he drives a motorbike. He said he would be back at work in ten minutes or so and reach us by this room number within the hour.”

  “Perfect!”

  “Not entirely. He wants five thousand francs.”

  “He could have asked ten times that.… What’s ‘within the hour’? How long before he calls?”

  “You were gone perhaps thirty, thirty-five minutes, and he reached me shortly after you left. I’d say within the next half hour.”

  The telephone rang. Twenty seconds later they had an address on the boulevard Lefebvre.

  “I’m leaving,” said Jason Bourne, taking Bernardine’s automatic off the desk and putting two grenades in his pocket. “Do you mind?”

  “Be my guest,” replied the Deuxième, reaching under his jacket and removing a second weapon from his belt. “Pickpockets so abound in Paris one should always carry a backup.… But what for?”

  “I’ve got at least a couple of hours and I want to look around.”

  “Alone?”

  “How else? If we call for support, I risk being gunned down or spending the rest of my life in jail for an assassination in Belgium I had nothing to do with.”

  Former judge of the first circuit court in Boston, the once Honorable Brendan Patrick Prefontaine, watched the weeping, disconsolate Randolph Gates as he sat forward on the couch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, his face in his widespread hands.

r />   “Oh, good Christ, how the mighty fall with such a thud of finality,” observed Brendan, pouring himself a short bourbon on the rocks. “So you got snookered, Randy. French style. Your facile brain and your imperial presence didn’t help you very much when you saw Paree, huh? You should have stayed ‘down on the farm,’ soldier boy.”

  “My God, Prefontaine, you don’t know what it was like! I was setting up a cartel—Paris, Bonn, London and New York with the Far East labor markets—an enterprise worth billions when I was taken from the Plaza-Athénée and put in a car and blindfolded. Then I was thrown into a plane and flown to Marseilles, where the most horrible things happened to me. I was kept in a room, and every few hours I was injected—for over six weeks! Women were brought in, films taken—I wasn’t myself!”

  “Maybe you were the self you never recognized, Dandy Boy. The same self that learned to anticipate instant gratification, if I use the phrase correctly. Make your clients extraordinary profits on paper, which they trade on the exchanges while thousands of jobs are lost in buy-outs. Oh, yes, my dear royalist, that’s instant gratification.”

  “You’re wrong, Judge—”

  “So lovely to hear that term again. Thank you, Randy.”

  “The unions became too strong. Industry was being crippled. Many companies had to go overseas to survive!”

  “And not talk? Oddly enough, you may have a point, but you never considered an alternative.… Regardless, we stray. You emerged from your confinement in Marseilles an addict—and, of course, there were the films of the eminent attorney in compromising situations.”

  “What could I do?” screamed Gates. “I was ruined!”

  “We know what you did. You became this Jackal’s confidence man in the world of high finance, a world where competition is undesirable baggage better lost along the way.”

  “It’s how he found me to begin with. The cartel we were forming was opposed by Japanese and Taiwanese interests. They hired him.… Oh, my God, he’ll kill me!”

  “Again?” asked the judge.

  “What?”

  “You forget. He thinks you’re already dead—thanks to me.”

  “I have cases coming up, a congressional hearing next week. He’ll know I’m alive!”

  “Not if you don’t show up.”

  “I have to! My clients expect—”

  “Then I agree,” interrupted Prefontaine. “He’ll kill you. Sorry about that, Randy.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “There’s a way, Dandy Boy, not only out of your current dilemma but for years to come. Of course, it will require some sacrifice on your part. For starters, a long convalescence at a private rehabilitation center, but even before that, your complete cooperation right now. The first ensures your imminent disappearance, the second—the capture and elimination of Carlos the Jackal. You’ll be free, Randy.”

  “Anything!”

  “How do you reach him?”

  “I have a telephone number!” Gates fumbled for his wallet, yanking it out of his pocket and with trembling fingers digging into a recess. “Only four people alive have it!”

  Prefontaine accepted his first $20,000-an-hour fee, instructed Randy to go home, beg Edith’s forgiveness, and be prepared to leave Boston tomorrow. Brendan had heard of a private treatment center in Minneapolis, he thought, where the rich sought help incognito; he would refine the details in the morning and call him, naturally expecting a second payment for his services. The instant a shaken Gates left the room, Prefontaine went to the phone and called John St. Jacques at Tranquility Inn.

  “John, it’s the judge. Don’t ask me questions, but I have urgent information that could be invaluable to your sister’s husband. I realize I can’t reach him, but I know he’s dealing with someone in Washington—”

  “His name is Alex Conklin,” interrupted St. Jacques. “Wait a minute, Judge, Marie wrote the number down on the desk blotter. Let me get over there.” The sound of one phone being placed on a hard surface preceded the clicks of another being picked up. “Here it is.” Marie’s brother recited the number.

  “I’ll explain everything later. Thank you, John.”

  “An awful lot of people keep telling me that, goddamn it!” said St. Jacques.

  Prefontaine dialed the number with a Virginia area code. It was answered with a short, brusque “Yes?”

  “Mr. Conklin, my name is Prefontaine and I was given this number by John St. Jacques. What I have to tell you is in the nature of an emergency.”

  “You’re the judge,” broke in Alex.

  “Past tense, I’m afraid. Very past.”

  “What is it?”

  “I know how to reach the man you call the Jackal.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me.”

  Bernardine stared at the ringing telephone, briefly debating with himself whether or not to pick it up. There was no question; he had to. “Yes?”

  “Jason? It’s you, isn’t it?… Perhaps I have the wrong room.”

  “Alex? This is you?”

  “Francois? What are you doing there? Where’s Jason?”

  “Things have happened so fast. I know he’s been trying to reach you.”

  “It’s been a rough day. We’ve got Panov back.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “I’ve got other news. A telephone number where the Jackal can be reached.”

  “We’ve got it! And a location. Our man left an hour ago.”

  “For Christ’s sake, how did you get it?”

  “A convoluted process I sincerely believe only your man could have negotiated. He’s brilliantly imaginative, a true caméléon.”

  “Let’s compare,” said Conklin. “What’s yours?”

  Bernardine complied, reciting the number he had written down on Bourne’s instructions.

  The silence on the phone was a silent scream. “They’re different,” said Alex finally, his voice choked. “They’re different!”

  “A trap,” said the Deuxième veteran. “God in heaven, it’s a trap!”

  26

  Twice Bourne had passed the dark, quiet row of old stone houses on the boulevard Lefebvre in the concrete backwater of the fifteenth arrondissement. He then doubled back to the rue d’Alésia and found a sidewalk café. The outdoor tables, their candles flickering under glass, were peopled mostly by gesturing, argumentative students from the nearby Sorbonne and Montparnasse. It was nearing ten o’clock and the aproned waiters were growing irritable; the majority of customers were not full of largess, either in their hearts or in their pockets. Jason wanted only a strong espresso, but the perpetual scowl on the face of the approaching garcon 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 limp

ing unsteadily in the shadows beside his companion; and for his second appraisal, he had hired a middle-aged whore as his cover, with no limp or stagger in his gait. He knew the terrain now, for all the good it did him, but it was the beginning of the end. He swore himself to that!

  The waiter arrived with his espresso and the cognac, and only when Jason placed a hundred-franc note on the table, accompanied by a wave of his hand, did the man’s hostile countenance move to neutral ground. “Merci,” he mumbled.

  “Is there a pay phone nearby?” asked Bourne, removing an additional ten-franc note.

  “Down the street, fifty, sixty meters,” replied the waiter, his eyes on the new money.

  “Nothing closer?” Jason peeled off another note, twenty francs. “I’m calling right here within a few blocks.”

  “Come with me,” said the aproned garçon, gingerly picking up the franc notes and leading Bourne through the open doors of the café to a cashier seated on high at the far end of the restaurant. The gaunt, sallow-faced woman looked annoyed; obviously she assumed that Bourne was a discontented customer.

  “Let him use your telephone,” said the waiter.

  “Why?” spat out the harridan. “So he can call China?”

  “He calls up the street. He will pay.”

  Jason proffered a ten-franc note, his innocent eyes looking blankly at the highly suspicious woman. “Augh, take it,” she said, removing a phone from under her cash-register stand and grasping the money. “It has an extension so you can move to the wall, as they all do. Men! Business and the bed, it’s all you think about!”

  He dialed the Pont-Royal and asked for his room, expecting Bernardine to pick up on the first or second ring. By the fourth, he was concerned; by the eighth, he was profoundly disturbed. Bernardine was not there! Had Santos …? No, the Deuxième veteran was armed and knew how to use his “deterrence”—there would have been at the least loud gunfire, at the last a room blown apart by a grenade. Bernardine had left under his own control. Why?

  There could be any one of several reasons, thought Bourne, handing back the telephone and returning to his table outside. The first and most wished for was news of Marie; the old intelligence officer would not raise false hopes by detailing the nets he had spread throughout the city, but they were there, Jason was sure of it.… Bourne could not think of another reason, so it was best not to think about Bernardine. He had other pressing considerations, the most intensely pressing of his life. He returned to the strong coffee and his notebook; every detail had to be exact.