“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.
“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?”