“No, you’re wrong, David. Pritchard may be a deluded, self-inflated jackass but he wouldn’t turn on me for money. It’s not that important in the islands—prestige is. And except when he drives me up the wall, I feed it to him; actually he does a pretty damn good job.”
“There’s no one else, Bro.”
“There’s also one way to find out. I’m here, not there, and I’m not about to leave here.”
“What’s your point?”
“I want to bring in Henry Sykes. Is that all right with you?”
“Do it.”
“How’s Marie?”
“As well as can be expected under the circumstances. … And, Johnny, I don’t want her to know a thing about any of this, do you understand me? When she reaches you, and she will, just tell her you’re settled in and everything’s okay, nothing about the move or Carlos.”
“I understand.”
“Everything is all right, isn’t it? How are the kids—how’s Jamie taking everything?”
“You may resent this, but he’s having a grand time, and Mrs. Cooper won’t even let me touch Alison.”
“I don’t resent either piece of information.”
“Thanks. What about you? Any progress?”
“I’ll be in touch,” said Bourne, hanging up and turning to Alex. “It doesn’t make sense, and Carlos always makes sense if you look hard enough. He leaves me a warning that drives me crazy with fear, but he has no means of carrying out his threat. What do you make of it?”
“The sense is in driving you crazy,” replied Conklin. “The Jackal’s not going to take on an installation like Tannenbaum’s sterile house long-distance. That message was meant to panic you and it did. He wants to throw you off so you’ll make mistakes. He wants the controls in his hands.”
“It’s another reason for Marie to fly back to the States as soon as possible. She’s got to. I want her inside a fortress, not having lunch out in the open in Barbizon.”
“I’m more sympathetic to that view than I was last night.” Alex was interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Krupkin walked into the room carrying several computer printouts.
“The number you gave me is disconnected,” he said, a slight hesitancy in his voice.
“Who was it connected to?” asked Jason.
“You will not like this any more than I do, and I’d lie to you if I could invent a plausible alternate, but I cannot and I undoubtedly should not. … As of five days ago it was transferred from an obviously false organization to the name of Webb. David Webb.”
Conklin and Bourne stared in silence at the Soviet intelligence officer, but in that silence were the unheard static cracks of high-voltage electricity. “Why are you so certain we won’t like the information?” asked Alex quietly.
“My fine old enemy,” began Krupkin, his gentle voice no louder than Conklin’s. “When Mr. Bourne came out of that café of horror with the brown paper clasped in his hand, he was hysterical. In trying to calm him, to bring him under control, you called him David. … I now have a name I sincerely wish I did not possess.”
“Forget it,” said Bourne.
“I shall do my best to, but there are ways—”
“That’s not what I mean,” broke in Jason. “I have to live with the fact that you know it and I’ll manage. Where was that phone installed, the address?”
“According to the billing computers, it’s a mission home run by an organization called the Magdalen Sisters of Charity. Again obviously false.”
“Obviously not,” corrected Bourne. “It exists. They exist. It’s legitimate down to their religious helmets, and it’s also a usable drop. Or was.”
“Fascinating,” mused Krupkin. “So much of the Jackal’s various façades is tied to the Church. A brilliant if overdone modus operandi. It’s said that he once studied for the priesthood.”
“Then the Church is one up on you,” said Alex, angling his head in a humorously mocking rebuke. “They threw him out before you did.”
“I never underestimate the Vatican,” laughed Dimitri. “It ultimately proved that our mad Joseph Stalin misunderstood priorities when he asked how many battalions the Pope had. His Holiness doesn’t need them; he achieves more than Stalin ever did with all his purges. Power goes to the one who instills the greatest fear, not so, Aleksei? All the princes of this earth use it with brutal effectiveness. And it all revolves around death—the fear of it, before and after. When will we grow up and tell them all to go to the devil?”
“Death,” whispered Jason, frowning. “Death on the Rivoli, at the Meurice, the Magdalen Sisters … my God, I completely forgot! Dominique Lavier! She was at the Meurice—she may still be there. She said she’d work with me!”
“Why would she?” asked Krupkin sharply.
“Because Carlos killed her sister and she had no choice but to join him or be killed herself.” Bourne turned to the console. “I need the telephone number of the Meurice—”
“Four two six zero, three eight six zero,” offered Krupkin as Jason grabbed a pencil and wrote down the numbers on Alex’s notepad. “A lovely place, once known as the hotel of kings. I especially like the grill.”
Bourne touched the buttons, holding up his hand for quiet. Remembering, he asked for Madame Brielle’s room, the name they had agreed upon, and when the hotel operator said “Mais oui,” he nodded rapidly in relief to Alex and Dimitri Krupkin. Lavier answered.
“Yes?”
“It is I, madame,” said Jason, his French just slightly coarse, ever so minimally Anglicized; the Chameleon was in charge. “Your housekeeper suggested we might reach you here. Madame’s dress is ready. We apologize for the delay.”
“It was to have been brought to me yesterday—by noon—you ass! I intended to wear it last evening at Le Grand Véfour. I was mortified!”
“A thousand apologies. We can deliver it to the hotel immediately.”
“You are again an ass! I’m sure my maid also told you I was here for only two days. Take it to my flat on the Montaigne and it had better be there by four o’clock or your bill will not be paid for six months!” The conversation was believably terminated by a loud crack at the other end of the line.
Bourne replaced the phone; perspiration had formed at his slightly graying hairline. “I’ve been out of this too long,” he said, breathing deeply. “She has a flat on the Montaigne and she’ll be there after four o’clock.”
“Who the hell is Dominique whatever her name is?” fairly yelled the frustrated Conklin.
“Lavier,” answered Krupkin, “only, she uses her dead sister’s name, Jacqueline. She’s been posing as her sister for years.”
“You know about that?” asked Jason, impressed.
“Yes, but it never did us much good. It was an understandable ruse—look-alikes, several months’ absence, minor surgery and programming—all quite normal in the abnormal world of haute couture. Who looks or listens to anyone in that superficial orbit? We watch her, but she’s never led us to the Jackal, she wouldn’t know how. She has no direct access; everything she reports to Carlos is filtered, stone walls at every relay. That’s the way of the Jackal.”
“It’s not always the way,” said Bourne. “There was a man named Santos who managed a run-down café in Argenteuil called Le Coeur du Soldat. He had access. He gave it to me and it was very special.”
“Was?” Krupkin raised his eyebrows. “Had? You employ the past tense?”
“He’s dead.”
“And that run-down café in Argenteuil, is it still flourishing?”
“It’s cleaned out and closed down,” admitted Jason, no defeat in his admission.
“So the access is terminated, no?”
“Sure, but I believe what he told me because he was killed for telling it to me. You see, he was getting out, just as this Lavier woman wants to get out—only, his association went back to the beginning. To Cuba, where Carlos saved a misfit like himself from execution. He knew he could use that man, that huge imposing giant who could operate inside the world of the dregs of humanity and be his primary relay. Santos had direct access. He proved it because he gave me an alternate number that did reach the Jackal. Only a very few men could do that.”
“Fascinating,” said Krupkin, his eyes firmly focused on Bourne. “But as my fine old enemy, Aleksei, who is now looking at you as I look at you, might inquire, what are you leading up to, Mr. Bourne? Your words are ambiguous but your implied accusations appear dangerous.”
“To you. Not to us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Santos told me that only four men in the world have direct access to the Jackal. One of them is in Dzerzhinsky Square. ‘Very high in the Komitet’ were Santos’s words, and believe me, he didn’t think much of your superior.”
It was as if Dimitri Krupkin had been struck in the face by a director of the Politburo in the middle of Red Square during a May Day parade. The blood drained from his head, his skin taking on the pallor of ash, his eyes steady, unblinking. “What else did this Santos tell you? I have to know!”