Another sound! This loud and abrupt. The crash bar on the hallway’s stairway exit had been slammed into the opening position, the heavy metal door smashed back into the concrete wall of the landing. The Jackal was heading down the flights of steps to the lobby. If the front desk had listened to Conklin, he was trapped!
Bourne looked at the elderly couple in the corner, affected by the fact that the old man was covering the woman with his own body. “It’s all right,” he. said, trying to calm them by lowering his voice. “I know you probably don’t understand me—I don’t speak Russian—but you’re safe now.”
“We don’t speak Russian either,” admitted the man, an Englishman, in clipped, guarded tones, straining his neck as he looked at Jason while trying to rise. “Thirty years ago I would have been standing at that door! Eighth Army with Monty, y’know. Rather grand at El Alamein—all of us, of course. To paraphrase, age doth wither, as they say.”
“I’d rather not hear it, General—”
“No, no, merely a brigadier—”
“Fine!” Bourne crept over the bed, testing his knee; whatever it was had snapped back. “I have to get to a phone!”
“Actually, what outraged me was the goddamned robe!” went on the veteran of El Alamein. “Fucking disgraceful, I say—forgive me, darling.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The white robe, lad! It had to be Binky’s—the couple across the hall we’re traveling with—he must have copped it from that lovely Beau-Rivage in Lausanne. The rotten theft is bad enough, but to have given it to that swine is unforgivable!”
In seconds, Jason had grabbed the Jackal’s weapon and crashed his way into the room across the hall, immediately knowing that “Binky” deserved more admiration than the brigadier afforded him. He lay on the floor bleeding from knife wounds across his stomach and throat.
“I can’t reach anyone!” screamed the woman with thinning gray hair; she was on her knees above the victim, weeping hysterically. “He fought like a madman—somehow he knew that priest wouldn’t fire his gun!”
“Hold the skin together wherever you can,” yelled Bourne, looking over at the telephone. It was intact! He ran to it, and instead of calling the front desk or the operator, he dialed the numbers for the suite.
“Krupkin?” cried Alex.
“No, me! First: Carlos is on the staircase—the hallway I went into! Second: a man’s cut up, same hallway, seventh door on the right! Hurry.”
“As fast as I can. I’ve got a clear line to the office.”
“Where the hell is the KGB team?”
“They just got here. Krupkin called only seconds ago from the lobby—it’s why I thought you were—”
“I’m going to the staircase!”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because he’s mine!”
Jason raced to the door, offering no words of comfort for the hysterical wife; he could not summon them. He crashed his way through the exit door, the Jackal’s weapon in his hand. He started down the staircase, suddenly hearing the sound of his own shoes; he stopped on the seventh step and removed both, and then his ankle-length socks. The cool surface of the stone on his feet somehow reminded him of the jungles, flesh against the cold morning underbrush; for some abstract, foolish memory he felt more in command of his fears—the jungles were always the friend of Delta One.
Floor by floor he descended, following the inevitable rivulets of blood, larger now, no longer to be stemmed, for the last wound was too severe to stop by exerting pressure. Twice the Jackal had applied such pressure, once at the fifth-floor and again at the third-floor hallway doors, only to be followed by streaks of dark red, as he could not manipulate the exterior locks without the security keys.
The second floor, then the first, there were no more! Carlos was trapped! Somewhere in the shadows below was the death of the killer who would set him free! Silently, Bourne removed a book of Metropole matches from his pocket; he huddled against the concrete wall, tore out a single match and, cupping his hands, fired the packet. He threw it over the railing, the weapon in his hand ready to explode with continuous rounds of bullets at anything that moved below!
There was nothing—nothing! The cement floor was empty—there was no one there! Impossible! Jason raced down the last flight of steps and pounded on the door to the lobby.
“Shto?” yelled a Russian inside. “Kto tam?”
“I’m an American! I’m working with the KGB! Let me in!”
“Shto … ?”
“I understand,” shouted another voice. “And, please, you understand that many guns are directed at you when I open the door. It is understand?”
“Understand!” shouted Bourne, at the last second remembering to drop Carlos’s weapon on the concrete floor. The door opened.
“Da!” said the Soviet police officer, instantly correcting himself as he spotted the machine pistol at Jason’s feet. “Nyet!” he yelled.
“Nye za shto?” said a breathless Krupkin, urging his heavyset body forward.
“Pochemu?”
“Komitet!”
“Prekrasno.” The policeman nodded obsequiously, but stayed in place.
“What are you doing?” demanded Krupkin. “The lobby is cleared and our assault squad is in place!”
“He was here!” whispered Bourne, as if his intense quiet voice further obscured his incomprehensible words.
“The Jackal?” asked Krupkin, astonished.
“He came down this staircase! He couldn’t have gone out on any other floor. Every fire door is dead-bolted from the inside—only the crash bars release them.”
“Skazhi,” said the KGB official to the hotel guard, speaking in Russian. “Has anyone come through this door within the past ten minutes since the orders were given to seal them off?”
“No, sir!” replied the mititsiya. “Only a hysterical woman in a soiled bathrobe. In her panic, she fell in the bathroom and cut herself. We thought she might have a heart attack, she was screaming so. We escorted her immediately to the nurse’s office.”
Krupkin turned to Jason, switching back to English. “Only a woman came through, a woman in panic who had inured herself.”
“A woman? Is he certain? … What color was her hair?” Dimitri asked the guard; with the man’s reply he again looked at Bourne. “He says it was reddish and quite curly.”
“Reddish?” An image came to Jason, a very unpleasant one. “A house phone—no, the front desk! Come on, I may need your help.” With Krupkin following, the barefooted Bourne ran across the lobby to a clerk at the reception counter. “Can you speak English?”
“Certainly most good, even many veniculars, mister sir.”
“A room plan for the tenth floor. Quickly.”
“Mister sir?”
Krupkin translated; a large loose-leaf notebook was placed on the counter, the plastic-enclosed page turned to—“This room!” said Jason, pointing at a square and doing his best not to alarm the frightened clerk. “Get it on the telephone! If the line’s busy, knock off anybody on it.”
Again Krupkin translated as a phone was placed in front of Bourne. He picked it up and spoke. “This is the man who came into your room a few minutes ago—”
“Oh, yes, of course, dear fellow. Thank you so much! The doctor’s here and Binky’s—”
“I have to know something, and I have to know it right now. … Do you carry hairpieces, or wigs, with you when you travel?”
“I’d say that’s rather impertinent—”
“Lady, I don’t have time for amenities, I have to know! Do you?”
“Well, yes I do. It’s no secret, actually, all my friends know it and they forgive the artifice. You see, dear boy, I have diabetes … my gray hair is painfully thin.”
“Is one of those wigs red?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I rather fancy changing—”
Bourne slammed down the phone and looked over at Krupkin. “The son of a bitch lucked out. It was Carlos!”
“Come with me!” said Krupkin as they both raced across the empty lobby to the complex of back-room offices of the Metropole. They reached the nurse’s infirmary door and went inside. They both stopped; both gasped and then winced at what they saw.
There were rolls of torn, unwound gauze and reels of tape in various widths, and broken syringes and tubes of antibiotics scattered about the examining table and the floor, as if all were somehow administered in panic. These, however, the two men barely noticed, for their eyes were riveted on the woman who had tended to her crazed patient. The Metropole’s nurse was arched back in her chair, her throat surgically punctured, and over her immaculate white uniform ran a thin stream of blood. Madness!
Standing beside the living room table, Dimitri Krupkin spoke on the phone as Alex Conklin sat on the brocaded couch massaging his bootless leg and Bourne stood by the window staring out on the Marx Prospekt. Alex looked over at the KGB officer, a thin smile on his gaunt face as Krupkin nodded, his eyes on Conklin. An acknowledgment was being transmitted between the two of them. They were worthy adversaries in a never-ending, essentially futile war in which only battles were won, the philosophical conflicts never resolved.