Suddenly, the Bronk’s wife came racing out of the diner, her platinum hair rising grotesquely in the air behind her as she ran to her bright red automobile. She climbed inside and in seconds the engine roared; she continued north as Mo watched, astonished.
“How are y’doing, buddy—wherever the hell you are?” shouted the short man with no name who had not only amazingly stopped a nosebleed but had rescued him from a manic wife whose paranoid mood swings were rooted in equal parts of vengeance and guilt.
Stop it, asshole, cried Panov to himself as he raised his voice. “Over here … buddy!”
Thirty-five minutes later they reached the outskirts of an unidentified town and the trucker stopped in front of a cluster of stores that bordered the highway. “You’ll find a phone there, buddy. Good luck.”
“Are you sure?” asked Mo. “About the money, I mean.”
“Sure I’m sure,” replied the short man behind the wheel. “Two hundred dollars is fine—maybe even what I earned—but more than that corrupts, don’t it? I been offered fifty times that to haul stuff I won’t haul, and you know what I tell ’em?”
“What do you tell them?”
“I tell ’em to go piss into the wind with their poison. It’s gonna flash back and blind ’em.”
“You’re a good person,” said Panov, climbing out onto the pavement.
“I got a few things to make up for.” The door of the cab slammed shut and the huge truck shot forward as Mo turned away, looking for a telephone.
“Where the hell are you?” shouted Alexander Conklin in Virginia.
“I don’t know!” answered Panov. “If I were a patient, I’d ponderously explain that it was an extension of some Freudian dream sequence because it never happens but it happened to me. They shot me up, Alex!”
“Stay cold. We assumed that. We have to know where you are. Let’s face it, others are looking for you, too.”
“All right, all right. … Wait a minute! There’s a drugstore across the street. The sign says ‘Battle Ford’s Best,’ will that help?”
The sigh on the line from Virginia was the reply. “Yes, it does. If you were a socially productive Civil War buff rather than an insignificant shrink, you’d know it, too.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Head for the old battleground at Ford’s Bluff. It’s a national landmark; there are signs everywhere. A helicopter will be there in thirty minutes, and don’t say a goddamned thing to anybody!”
“Do you know how extreme you sound? Yet I was the object of hostility—”
“Out, coach!”
Bourne walked into the Pont-Royal and immediately approached the night concierge, peeling off a five-hundred-franc note and placing it quietly in the man’s hand. “The name is Simon,” he said, smiling. “I’ve been away. Any messages?”
“No messages, Monsieur Simon,” was the quiet reply, “but two men are outside, one on Montalembert, the other across on the rue du Bac.”
Jason removed a thousand-franc note and palmed it to the man. “I pay for such eyes and I pay well. Keep it up.”
“Of course, monsieur.”
Bourne crossed to the brass elevator. Reaching his floor, he walked rapidly down the intersecting corridors to his room. Nothing was disturbed; everything was as he had left it, except that the bed had been made up. The bed. Oh, God, he needed to rest, to sleep. He couldn’t do it any longer. Something was happening inside him—less energy, less breath. Yet he had to have both, now more than ever. Oh, Christ, he wanted to lie down. … No. There was Marie. There was Bernardine. He went to the telephone and dialed the number he had committed to memory.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Four hours late, mon ami. What happened?”
“No time. What about Marie?”
“There is nothing. Absolutely nothing. She is not on any international flight currently in the air or scheduled for departure. I even checked the transfers from London, Lisbon, Stockholm and Amsterdam—nothing. There is no Marie Elise St. Jacques Webb en route to Paris.”
“There has to be. She wouldn’t change her mind, it’s not like her. And she wouldn’t know how to bypass immigration.”
“I repeat. She’s not listed on any flight from any country coming into Paris.”
“Damn!”
“I will keep trying, my friend. The words of Saint Alex keep ringing in my ears. Do not underestimate la belle mademoiselle.”
“She’s not a goddamned mademoiselle, she’s my wife. … She’s not one of us, Bernardine; she’s not an agent in the field who can cross and double-cross and triple-cross. That’s not her. But she’s on her way to Paris. I know it!”
“The airlines do not, what more can I say?”
“Just what you said,” said Jason, his lungs seemingly incapable of absorbing the air he needed, his eyelids heavy. “Keep trying.”
“What happened tonight? Tell me.”
“Tomorrow,” replied David Webb, barely audible. “Tomorrow. … I’m so tired and I have to be somebody else.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t even sound like yourself.”
“Nothing. Tomorrow. I have to think. … Or maybe I shouldn’t think.”
f f f
Marie stood in Marseilles’s immigration line, mercifully short because of the early hour, and assumed an air of boredom, the last thing she felt. It was her turn to go to the passport counter.
“Américaine,” said the half-awake official. “Are you beer on bizziness or playseeoor, madame?”
“Je parle français, monsieur. Je suis canadienne d’origine—Québec. Séparatiste.”
“Ah, bien!” The sleepy clerk’s eyes opened somewhat wider as he proceeded in French. “You are in business?”
“No, I’m not. This is a journey of memories. My parents came from Marseilles and both died recently. I want to see where they came from, where they lived—perhaps what I missed.”
“How extraordinarily touching, lovely lady,” said the immigration official, appraising the most appealing traveler. “Perhaps also you might need a guide? There is no part of this city that is not indelibly printed on my mind.”
“You’re most kind. I’ll be at the Sofitel Vieux Port. What’s your name? You have mine.”
“Lafontaine, madame. At your service!”
“Lafontaine? You don’t say?”
“I do indeed!”
“How interesting.”
“I am very interesting,” said the official, his eyelids half closed but not with sleepiness, as his rubber stamps flew recklessly down to process the tourist. “I am at your every service, madame!”
It must run in that very peculiar clan, thought Marie as she headed for the luggage area. From there she would board a domestic flight to Paris under any name she chose.
François Bernardine awoke with a start, shooting up on his elbows, frowning, disturbed. She’s on her way to Paris, I know it! The words of the husband who knew her best. She’s not listed on any flight from any other country coming into Paris. His own words. Paris: The operative word was Paris!
But suppose it was not Paris?
The Deuxième veteran crawled rapidly out of bed in the early morning light shining through the tall narrow windows of his flat. In fewer minutes than his face appreciated, he shaved, then completed his ablutions, dressed, and walked down into the street to his Peugeot, where there was the inevitable ticket on the windshield; alas, it was no longer officially dismissible with a quiet phone call. He sighed, picked it off the glass, and climbed in behind the wheel.
Fifty-eight minutes later he swung the car into the parking lot of a small brick building in the huge cargo complex of Orly Airport. The building was nondescript; the work inside was not. It was a branch of the Department of Immigration, an all-important arm known simply as the Bureau of Air Entries, where sophisticated computers kept up-to-the-minute records of every traveler flying into France at all the international airports. It was vital to immigration but not often consulted by the Deuxième, for there were far too many other points of entry used by the people in which the Deuxième was interested. Nevertheless, over the years, Bernardine, operating on the theory of the obvious being unnoticed, had sought information from the Bureau of Air Entries. Every now and then he had been rewarded. He wondered if that would be the case this morning.
Nineteen minutes later he had his answer. It was the case, but the reward was considerably diminished in value, for the information came too late. There was a pay phone in the bureau’s lobby; Bernardine inserted a coin and dialed the Pont-Royal.
“Yes?” coughed the voice of Jason Bourne.
“I apologize for waking you.”
“François?”
“Yes.”
“I was just getting up. There are two men down in the street far more tired than I am, unless they’re replacements.”
“Relative to last night? All night?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Is that why you called?”
“No. I’m out at Orly and I’m afraid I have bad news, information that proves me an idiot. I should have considered it. … Your wife flew into Marseilles slightly over two hours ago. Not Paris. Marseilles.”