“Wait.”
“Too late.”
“We must talk!”
“We will.” Releasing his arm, Jason instantly crashed both his hands simultaneously into the woman’s shoulder blades where the tendons weave into the neck muscles. She collapsed; he caught her in the fall and carried her out of the narrow street as an adoring supplicant might a religious social worker. The dawn light was beginning to fill the sky, and several early risers, one a young jogger in shorts, converged on the man carrying the nun. “She’s been with my wife and sick children for nearly two days without sleep!” pleaded the Chameleon in street French. “Will someone please find me a taxi so I can take her back to her convent in the ninth arrondissement?”
“I shall!” roared the young runner. “There’s an all-night stand on the rue de Sèvres, and I’m very fast!”
“You are a gift, monsieur,” said Jason, appreciating but instantly disliking the all too confident, all too young jogger.
Six minutes later the taxi arrived, the youth inside. “I told the driver you have money,” he said, climbing out. “I trust it’s so.”
“Of course. And thanks.”
“Tell the sister what I did,” added the young man in running shorts, helping Bourne gently insert the unconscious woman into the back of the taxi. “I’ll need all the help I can get when my time comes.”
“I trust that’s not imminent,” said Jason, trying to return the youth’s grin.
“Not likely! I represent my firm in the marathon.” The overgrown child began running in place.
“Thanks again. I hope you win the next one.”
“Tell the sister to pray for me!” cried the athlete, racing away.
“The Bois de Boulogne,” said Bourne, closing the door and addressing the driver.
“The Bois? That ventilating nut told me it was an emergency! You had to get the nun to a hospital.”
“She drank too much wine, what can I tell you?”
“The Bois de Boulogne,” said the driver, nodding his head. “Let her walk it off. I have a second cousin in the Lyons convent. She gets out for a week she’s soused to the temples. Who can blame her?”
The bench on the graveled path of the Bois progressively received the warm rays of the early sun as the middle-aged woman in the religious habit began snaking her head. “How are you doing, Sister?” asked Jason, sitting beside his prisoner.
“I believe I was struck by an army tank,” replied the woman, blinking and opening her mouth to swallow air. “At least a tank.”
“Which I suspect you know more about than a welfare wagon from the Magdalen Sisters of Charity.”
“Quite so,” agreed the woman.
“Don’t bother to look for your gun,” said Bourne. “I removed it from the very expensive belt under your habit.”
“I’m glad you recognized the value. It’s part of what we must talk about.… Since I am not in a police station, I assume you’ve granted me my request to talk.”
“Only if what you say suits my purpose, I assume you understand that.”
“But it must, you see. Suit your purpose, as you say. I’ve failed. I’ve been taken. I’m not where I should be, and whatever the time is, the light tells me I’m too late for excuses. Also, my bicycle has either disappeared or is still chained to the lamp-post.”
“I didn’t take it.”
“Then I’m a dead woman. And if it’s gone I’m just as dead, don’t you see?”
“Because you’ve disappeared? Not where you’re supposed to be?”
“Of course.”
“You’re Lavier!”
“That’s true. I’m Lavier. But I’m not the woman you knew. You knew my sister Jacqueline—I am Dominique Lavier. We were close in age and since we were children strongly resembled each other. But you are not wrong about Neuilly-sur-Seine or what you saw there. My sister was killed because she broke a cardinal rule, committed a mortal sin, if you like. She panicked and led you to Carlos’s woman, his most cherished and useful secret.”
“Me?… You know who I am?”
“All Paris—the Jackal’s Paris—knows who you are, Monsieur Bourne. Not by sight, I grant you, but they know you are here and they know you’re tracking Carlos.”
“And you’re part of that Paris?”
“I am.”
“Good Christ, lady, he killed your sister!”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Still you work for him?”
“There are times when a person’s choices are considerably reduced. Say, to live or to die. Until six years ago when Les Classiques changed ownership, it was vital to the monseigneur. I took Jacqui’s place—”
“Just like that?”
“It wasn’t difficult. I was younger, and more to the point I looked younger.” The lines in the middle-aged Lavier’s face cracked with a brief pensive smile. “My sister always said it came with living on the Mediterranean.… At any rate, cosmetic surgery is commonplace in the world of haute couture. Jacqui supposedly went to Switzerland for a face-lift … and I returned to Paris after eight weeks of preparation.”
“How could you? Knowing what you knew, how the hell could you?”
“I did not know earlier what I learned later, by which time it was irrelevant. By then I had the choice I just mentioned. To live or to die.”
“It never occurred to you to go to the police or the Sûreté?”
“Regarding Carlos?” The woman looked at Bourne as if rebuking a foolish child. “As the British say in Cap Ferrat, surely you jest.”
“So you blithely went into the killing game?”
“Not consciously. I was gradually led into it, my education slow, piecemeal.… In the beginning I was told Jacqueline had died in a boating accident with her lover of the month and that I would be enormously well paid to carry on in her place. Les Classiques was far more than a grand salon—”
“Far more,” agreed Jason, interrupting. “It was the drop for France’s most highly classified military and intelligence secrets funneled to the Jackal by his woman, a celebrated general’s wife.”
“I was not aware of that until long after the general killed her. Villiers was his name, I believe.”
“It was.” Jason looked across the path at the still dark waters of a pond, white lilies floating in clusters. Images came back to him. “I’m the one who found him, found them. Villiers was in a high-backed chair, a gun in his hand, his wife lying on the bed, naked, bleeding, dead. He was going to kill himself. It was a proper execution for a traitor, he said, for his devotion to his wife had blinded his judgment and in that blindness he had betrayed his beloved France.… I convinced him there was another way; it almost worked—thirteen years ago. In a strange house on Seventy-first Street in New York.”
“I don’t know what happened in New York, but General Villiers left instructions that after his death what happened in Paris was to be made part of the public record. When he died and the truth was known, it was said that Carlos went mad with fury, killing several high-ranking military commanders simply because they were generals.”
“It’s all an old story,” interrupted Bourne sharply. “This is now, thirteen years later. What happens now?”
“I don’t know, monsieur. My choices are zero, aren’t they? One or the other of you will kill me, I suppose.”
“Maybe not. Help me take him and you’re free of both of us. You can go back to the Mediterranean and live in peace. You won’t even have to disappear—you merely return to wherever it is after a number of profitable years in Paris.”
“Disappear?” asked Lavier, studying the haggard face of her captor. “As in the word ‘vanish’?”
“No need for that. Carlos can’t reach you because he’ll be dead.”
“Yes, I understand that part. It’s the disappearance that interests me along with the ‘profitable’ years. Does this profit come from you?”
“Yes.”
“I see.… Is that what you offered Santos? A
profitable disappearance?”
It was as if the words were hard flesh and had slapped him across the face. Jason looked at his prisoner. “So it was Santos, after all,” he said softly. “The Lefebvre was a trap. Christ, he’s good.”
“He’s dead, Le Coeur du Soldat cleaned out and closed down.”
“What?” Stunned, Bourne again stared at the Lavier woman. “That was his reward for cornering me?”
“No, for betraying Carlos.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The monseigneur has eyes everywhere, I’m sure that’s no surprise to you. Santos, the total recluse, was observed sending several heavy boxes out with his main food supplier, and yesterday morning he did not clip and water his precious garden, a summer ritual as predictable as the sun. A man was sent to the supplier’s warehouse and opened the boxes—”
“Books,” broke in Jason quietly.
“Placed in storage until further instructions,” completed Dominique Lavier. “Santos’s departure was to be swift and secret.”
“And Carlos knew there was no one in Moscow giving out a telephone number.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.… What kind of man was Santos?”
“I never knew him, never even saw him. I’ve only heard the downstairs rumors, which weren’t many.”
“I haven’t time for many. What were they?”
“Apparently he was a very large man—”
“I know that,” interrupted Jason impatiently. “And from the books we both know that he was well read, probably well educated, if his speech was indicative. Where did he come from and why did he work for the Jackal?”
“They say he was Cuban and fought in Fidel’s revolution, that he was a deep thinker, as well as a law student with Castro, and once a great athlete. Then, of course, as in all revolutions, the internal strife sours the victories—at least that’s what my old friends from the May Day barricades tell me.”
“Translation, please?”
“Fidel was jealous of the leaders of certain cadres, especially Che Guevara and the man you knew as Santos. Where Castro was larger than life, those two were larger than he was, and Fidel could not tolerate the competition. Che was sent on a mission that ended his life, and trumped up counterrevolutionary charges were brought against Santos. He was within an hour of being executed when Carlos and his men broke into the prison and spirited him away.”
“Spirited? Dressed as priests, no doubt.”
“I have no doubts. The Church with all its medieval lunacies once held sway over Cuba.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I’m a woman, the Pontiff is not; he’s merely medieval.”
“Judgment decreed.… So Santos joined forces with Carlos, two disillusioned Marxists in search of their personal cause—or maybe their own personal Hollywood.”
“That’s beyond me, monsieur, but if I vaguely understand you, the fantasy belongs to the brilliant Carlos; the bitter disillusion was Santos’s fate. He owed his life to the Jackal, so why not give it? What was left for him?… Until you came along.”
“That’s all I need. Thanks. I just wanted a few gaps filled in.”
“Gaps?”
“Things I didn’t know.”
“What do we do now, Monsieur Bourne? Wasn’t that your original question?”
“What do you want to do, Madame Lavier?”
“I know I don’t want to die. And I am not Madame Lavier in the marital sense. The restrictions never appealed to me and the benefits seemed unnecessary. For years I was a high-priced call girl in Monte Carlo, Nice and Cap Ferrat until my looks and my body deserted me. Still, I once had friends from the old days, intermittent lovers who took care of me for old times’ sake. Most are dead now, a pity, really.”
“I thought you said you were enormously well paid for assuming your sister’s identity.”
“Oh, I was and to a degree I still am, for I’m still valuable. I move among the elite of Paris, where gossip abounds, and that’s often helpful. I have a beautiful flat on the avenue Montaigne. Antiques, fine paintings, servants, charge accounts—everything a woman once in high fashion should be expected to have for the circles she still travels in. And money. Every month my bank receives eighty thousand francs from Geneva—somewhat more than enough for me to pay the bills. For, you see, I have to pay them, no one else can do so.”
“So then you’ve got money.”
“No, monsieur. I have a life-style, not money. That’s the way of the Jackal. Except for the old men, he pays only for what he gets in terms of immediate service. If the money from Geneva does not arrive at my bank on the tenth of every month, I’d be thrown out in thirty days. But then if Carlos decided to get rid of me, there would be no need for Geneva. I’d be finished—as I am no doubt finished now. If I returned to my flat in the Montaigne this morning, I’d never come out … as my sister never came out of that church in Neuilly-sur-Seine. At least not alive.”
“You’re convinced of that?”
“Of course. The stop where I chained the bicycle was made to receive instructions from one of the old men. The orders were precise and to be precisely followed. A woman I know would meet me in twenty minutes at a bakery in Saint-Germain where we were to exchange clothes. She was to proceed to the Magdalen mission and I was to meet a courier from Athens in a room at the Hôtel Trémoille.”
“The Magdalen mission …? You mean those women on the bicycles were actually nuns?”
“Complete with vows of chastity and poverty, monsieur. I am a frequent visiting superior from the convent at Saint-Malo.”
“And the woman at the bakery. Is she—?”
“She falls from grace now and then, but she’s a perfectly splendid administrator.”
“Jesus,” mumbled Bourne.
“He’s frequently on their lips.… Do you see now the hopelessness of my position?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Then I am forced to wonder if you really are the Chameleon. I was not at the bakery. The meeting with the Greek courier never took place. Where was I?”
“You were delayed. The bicycle chain broke; you got grazed by one of those trucks on the rue Lecourbe. Hell, you got mugged. What’s the difference? You were delayed.”
“How long has it been since you rendered me unconscious?”
Jason looked at his watch, now easily seen in the bright morning sunlight. “Something over an hour-plus, I think; perhaps an hour and a half. Considering how you were dressed, the taxi driver cruised around trying to find a place to park where we could help you to a bench on the path with as little scrutiny as possible. He was well paid for his assistance.”
“An hour and a half?” asked Lavier pointedly.
“So?”
“So why didn’t I call the bakery or the Hôtel Trémoille?”
“Complications?… No, too easily verified,” added Bourne, shaking his head.
“Or?” Lavier locked her large green eyes with his. “Or, monsieur?”
“The boulevard Lefebvre,” replied Jason slowly, softly. “The trap. As I reversed his on me, he reversed mine for him three hours later. Then I broke the strategy and took you.”
“Exactly.” The once and former whore of Monte Carlo nodded. “And he cannot know what transpired between us … therefore, I’m marked for execution. A pawn is removed, for she is merely a pawn. She can tell the authorities nothing of substance; she’s never seen the Jackal; she can only repeat the gossip of lowly subordinates.”
“You’ve never seen him?”
“I may have, but not to my knowledge. Again, the rumors fly around Paris. This one with swarthy Latin skin, or that one with black eyes and a dark mustache; ‘He is really Carlos, you know’—how often have I heard the phrases! But no, no man has ever come up to me and said, ‘I am he and I make your life pleasant, you aging elegant prostitute.’ I simply report to old men who every now and then convey information that I must have—such as this evening on t
he boulevard Lefebvre.”
“I see.” Bourne got to his feet, stretching his body and looking down at his prisoner on the bench. “I can get you out,” he said quietly. “Out of Paris, out of Europe. Beyond Carlos’s reach. Do you want that?”
“As eagerly as Santos did,” answered Lavier, her eyes imploring. “I willingly trade my allegiance from him to you.”
“Why?”
“Because he is old and gray-faced and is no match for you. You offer me life; he offers death.”
“That’s a reasonable decision, then,” said Jason, a tentative but warm smile on his lips. “Do you have any money? With you, I mean?”
“Nuns are sworn to poverty, monsieur,” replied Dominique Lavier, returning his smile. “Actually, I have several hundred francs. Why?”
“It’s not enough,” continued Bourne, reaching into his pocket and taking out his impressive roll of franc notes. “Here’s three thousand,” he said, handing her the money. “Buy some clothes somewhere—I’m sure you know how—and take a room at the … the Meurice on the rue de Rivoli.”
“What name should I use?”
“What suits you?”
“How about Brielle? A lovely seaside town.”
“Why not?… Give me ten minutes to get out of here and then leave. I’ll see you at the Meurice at noon.”
“With all my heart, Jason Bourne!”
“Let’s forget that name.”
The Chameleon walked out of the Bois de Boulogne to the nearest taxi station. Within minutes an ecstatic cabdriver accepted a hundred francs to remain in place at the end of the three-vehicle line, his passenger slumped in the rear seat waiting to hear the words.
“The nun comes out, monsieur!” cried the driver. “She enters the first taxi!”
“Follow it,” said Jason, sitting up.
On the avenue Victor Hugo, Lavier’s taxi slowed down and pulled up in front of one of Paris’s few exceptions to tradition—an open plastic-domed public telephone. “Stop here,” ordered Bourne, who climbed out the instant the driver swung into the curb. Limping, the Chameleon walked swiftly, silently, to the telephone directly behind and unseen by the frantic nun under the plastic dome. He was not seen, but he could hear clearly as he stood several feet behind her.