“She’s upset—”
“So am I,” broke in Alex, not bothering to make light of Bourne’s understatement. “Mo’s disappeared.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Panov’s gone, vanished.”
“My God, how? He was guarded every minute!”
“We’re trying to piece it together; that’s where I was, over at the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Walter Reed. He was in a psych session with a military this morning, and when it was over he never came out to his detail. They waited twenty minutes or so, then went in to find him and his escort because he was on a tight schedule. They were told he left.”
“That’s crazy!”
“It gets crazier and scarier. The head floor nurse said an army doctor, a surgeon, came to the desk, showed his ID, and instructed her to tell Dr. Panov that there was a change of routing for him, that he was to use the east-wing exit because of an expected protest march at the main entrance. The east wing has a different hallway to the psych area than the one to the main lobby, yet the army surgeon used the main doors.”
“Come again?”
“He walked right past our escort in the hallway.”
“And obviously out the same way and around to the east-wing hall. Nothing on-scene unusual. A doctor with clearance in a restricted area, in and out, and while he’s in, he delivers false instructions. … But, Christ, Alex, who? Carlos was on his way back here, to Paris! Whatever he wanted in Washington he got. He found me, he found us. He didn’t need any more!”
“DeSole,” said Conklin quietly. “DeSole knew about me and Mo Panov. I threatened the Agency with both of us, and DeSole was there in the conference room.”
“I’m not with you. What are you telling me?”
“DeSole, Brussels … Medusa.”
“All right, I’m slow.”
“It’s not he, David, it’s they. DeSole was taken out, our connection removed. It’s Medusa.”
“To hell with them! They’re on my back burner!”
“You’re not on theirs. You cracked their shell. They want you.”
“I couldn’t care less. I told you yesterday, I’ve only got one priority and he’s in Paris, square one in Argenteuil.”
“Then I haven’t been clear,” said Alex, his voice faint, the tone defeated. “Last night I had dinner with Mo. I told him everything. Tranquility, your flying to Paris, Bernardine … everything!”
A former judge of the first circuit court, residing in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, stood among the small gathering of mourners on the flat surface of the highest hill on Tranquility Isle. The cemetery was the final resting place—in voce verbatim via amicus curiae, as he legally explained to the authorities on Montserrat. Brendan Patrick Pierre Prefontaine watched as the two splendid coffins provided by the generous owner of Tranquility Inn were lowered into the ground along with the absolutely incomprehensible blessings of the native priest, who no doubt usually had the neck of a dead chicken in his mouth while intoning his benediction in voodoo language. “Jean Pierre Fontaine” and his wife were at peace.
Nevertheless, barbarism notwithstanding, Brendan, the quasi-alcoholic street lawyer of Harvard Square, had found a cause. A cause beyond his own survival, and that in itself was remarkable. Randolph Gates, Lord Randolph of Gates, Dandy Randy of the Courts of the Elite, was in reality a scumball, a conduit of death in the Caribbean. And the outlines of a scheme were forming in Prefontaine’s progressively clearer mind, clearer because, among other inhumane deprivations, he had suddenly decided to do without his four shots of vodka upon waking up in the morning. Gates had provided the essential information that led the would-be killers of the Webb family to Tranquility Isle. Why? … That was basically, even legally, irrelevant; the fact that he had supplied their whereabouts to known killers, with prior knowledge that they were killers, was not. That was accomplice to murder, multiple murder. Dandy Randy’s testicles were in a vise, and as the plates closed, he would—he had to—reveal information that would assist the Webbs, especially the glorious auburn-headed woman he wished to almighty God he had met fifty years ago.
Prefontaine was flying back to Boston in the morning, but he had asked John St. Jacques if he might return one day. Perhaps not with a prepaid reservation.
“Judge, my house is your house” was the reply.
“I might even earn that courtesy.”
Albert Armbruster, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, got out of his limousine and stood on the pavement before the steep steps of his town house in Georgetown. “Check with the office in the morning,” he said to the chauffeur, holding the rear door. “As you know, I’m not a well man.”
“Yes, sir.” The driver closed the door. “Would you like assistance, sir?”
“Hell, no. Get out of here.”
“Yes, sir.” The government chauffeur climbed into the front seat; the sudden roar of his engine was not meant as a courteous exit as he sped down the street.
Armbruster climbed the stone staircase, his stomach and chest heaving with each step, cursing under his breath at the sight of his wife’s silhouette beyond the glass door of their Victorian entrance. “Shit-kicking yapper,” he said to himself as he neared the top, gripping the railing before facing his adversary of thirty years.
A spit exploded out of the darkness from somewhere within the grounds of the property next door. Armbruster’s arms flew up, his wrists bent as if trying to locate the bodily chaos; it was too late. The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission tumbled back down the stone staircase, his thumping dead weight landing grotesquely on the pavement below.
Bourne changed into the French denim trousers, slipped on a dark short-sleeved shirt and the cotton safari jacket, put his money, his weapon and all his IDs—authentic and false—into his pockets and left the Pont-Royal. Before doing so, however, he stuffed the bed with pillows, and hung his traveling clothes in clear view over the chair. He walked casually past the ornate front desk, and once outside on Montalembert ran to the nearest telephone kiosk. He inserted a coin and dialed Bernardine’s home.
“It’s Simon,” he said.
“I thought so,” replied the Frenchman. “I was hoping so. I’ve just heard from Alex and told him not to tell me where you were; one cannot reveal what one does not know. Still, if I were you, I’d go to another place, at least for the night. You may have been spotted at the airport.”
“What about you?”
“I intend to be a canard.”
“A duck?”
“The sitting variety. The Deuxième has my flat under watch. Perhaps I’ll have a visitor; it would be convenient, n’est-ce pas?”
“You didn’t tell your office about—”
“About you?” interrupted Bernardine. “How could I, monsieur, when I don’t know you? My protective Bureau believes I had a threatening call from an old adversary known to be a psychopath. Actually I removed him in the Maritimes years ago but I never closed the file—”
“Should you be telling me this on your telephone?”
“I thought I mentioned that it was a unique instrument.”
“You did.”
“Suffice it to say it cannot be tapped and still function. … You need rest, monsieur. You are no good to anyone, least of all yourself, without it. Find a bed, I cannot help you there.”
“ ‘Rest is a weapon,’ ” said Jason, repeating a phrase he had come to believe was a vital truth, vital for survival in a world he loathed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. I’ll find a bed and call you in the morning.”
“Tomorrow then. Bonne chance, mon ami. For both of us.”
f f f
He found a room at the Avenir, an inexpensive hotel on the rue Gay-Lussac. Registering under a false name, promptly forgotten, he climbed the stairs to his room, removed his clothes, and fell into the bed. “Rest is a weapon,” he said to himself, staring at the ceiling, at the flickering lights of the Paris streets as they traveled across the plaster. Whether rest came in a mountain cave or a rice paddy in the Mekong Delta, it did not matter; it was a weapon frequently more powerful than firepower. That was the lesson drummed into his head by d’Anjou, the man who had given his life in a Beijing forest so that Jason Bourne might live. Rest is a weapon, he considered, touching the bandage around his neck yet not really feeling it, its constricting presence fading as sleep came.
He woke up slowly, cautiously, the noise of the traffic in the streets below pounding up to his window, the metallic horns like the erratic cawing of angry crows amid the irregular bursts of angry engines, full bore one moment, abrupt quiet the next. It was a normal morning in the narrow streets of Paris. Holding his neck rigid, Jason swung his legs to the floor from the inadequate bed and looked at his watch, startled at what he saw, wondering for an instant whether he had adjusted the watch for Paris time. Of course he had. It was 10:07 in the morning—Paris time. He had slept nearly eleven hours, a fact confirmed by the rumbling in his stomach. Exhaustion was now replaced by acute hunger.