The minister sat staring out at the rain for some time. “Filthy weather,” he said at last.
“Jacques…?”
Robbinet looked around. “Ah, yes, forgive me, mon ami. My mind wanders. Alors, I am taking you to meet Mylene Dutronc.” He cocked his head. “Have you heard her name?” When Bourne shook his head, Robbinet continued. “I thought not. Well, now that he’s dead, I suppose I can say it. Mlle. Dutronc was Alex Conklin’s lover.”
At once, Bourne said, “Let me guess: light eyes, long wavy hair and a smile with something of the ironic about it.”
“He did tell you about her!”
“No, I saw a photo. It’s pretty much all he had of a personal nature in his bedroom.” He waited a moment. “Does she know?”
“I phoned her as soon as I found out.”
Bourne wondered why Robbinet hadn’t told her in person. It would have been the decent thing to do.
“Enough talk.” Robbinet grabbed an overnight bag from the footwell of the backseat. “We’ll go see Mylene now.”
Exiting the Peugeot, they went through the rain, along a little flower-flanked walk, and mounted a short flight of poured-concrete stairs. Robbinet pressed the button for 4A and a moment later the buzzer sounded.
The apartment building was as plain and unlovely on the inside as it was on the outside. They walked up the five flights of stairs to the fourth floor and went along a hallway, past rows of identical doors on either side. At the sound of their approach, the door opened. Just inside stood Mylene Dutronc.
She was perhaps a decade older than the image in the photo—in fact, she must have been sixty by now, Bourne thought, though she appeared at least ten years younger—but her light eyes had the same sparkle and her smile had the same enigmatic twist to it. She wore jeans and a man-tailored shirt, an outfit that made her appear feminine because it showed off her full figure. She was in low heels and her hair, a natural-looking ash-blond, was tied back from her face.
“Bonjour, Jacques.” She lifted her face for Robbinet to kiss on both cheeks, but she was already looking at his companion.
Bourne could see details that the snapshot hadn’t revealed. The color of her eyes, the sculpted flare of her nostrils, the whiteness of her even teeth. Her face was both powerful and compassionate.
“And you must be Jason Bourne.” Her gray eyes appraised him coolly.
“I’m sorry about Alex,” Bourne said.
“You’re kind. It’s been a shock to all of us who knew him.” She stepped back. “Please come in.”
As she shut the door behind her, Bourne took in the room. Mlle. Dutronc lived in the middle of a blocky urban landscape, but her apartment was altogether different. Unlike many people her age, she had not continued to surround herself with furniture decades old, relics of the past. Instead, her furnishings were both stylishly modern and comfortable. A scattering of chairs, a matching pair of sofas facing each other on either side of a brick fireplace, patterned curtains. It was a place you would not easily want to leave, Bourne decided.
“I understand you’ve had a long flight,” she said to Bourne. “You must be starving.” She made no mention of his disheveled appearance, for which he was grateful. She seated him in the dining room, served him food and drink from a typical European kitchen, small and dark. When she was finished, she sat down opposite him, put her clasped hands on the table.
Bourne could see now that she had been crying.
“Did he die instantly?” Mlle. Dutronc asked. “You see, I’ve been wondering whether he suffered.”
“No,” Bourne said truthfully. “I very much doubt he did.”
“That’s something, at least.” A look of profound relief came over her face. Mlle. Dutronc sat back and, with this movement, Bourne became aware that she had been holding her body tensely. “Thank you, Jason.” She looked up, her expressive gray eyes locked on his, and he could see all the emotion in her face. “May I call you Jason?”
“Of course,” he said.
“You knew Alex well, didn’t you?”
“As well as one could ever know Alex Conklin.”
For just an instant, her gaze flicked in Robbinet’s direction, but it was enough.
“I have some calls to make.” The minister had already pulled out his cell phone. “You won’t mind if I leave you two for a little while.”
She looked bleakly after Robbinet as he headed for the living room. Then she turned back to Bourne. “Jason, what you told me just now was said as a true friend. Even if Alex had never spoken to me about you, I would say the same thing.”
“Alex talked to you about me?” Bourne shook his head. “Alex never told civilians about his work.”
There was that smile again; this time the irony in it was quite apparent. “But I’m not, as you say, a civilian.” There was a pack of cigarettes in her hand. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
“Many Americans do. It’s something of an obsession with you, isn’t it?”
She had not been seeking an answer and Bourne did not give her one. He watched as she lit up, drew the smoke deep into her lungs, let it out slowly, luxuriously. “No, I’m definitely not a civilian.” The smoke swirled around her. “I’m Quai d’Orsay.”
Bourne sat very still. Beneath the table, his hand grasped the butt of the ceramic pistol Deron had given him.
As if reading his mind, Mlle. Dutronc shook her head. “Calm yourself, Jason. Jacques hasn’t led you into a trap. You’re among friends here.”
“I don’t understand,” he said thickly. “If you’re Quai d’Orsay, Alex would’ve been doubly sure not to involve you in anything he was working on, so as not to compromise your loyalties.”
“True enough. And this was how it remained for many years.” Mlle. Dutronc took in more smoke, let it drift out of her flared nostrils. She had a habit of raising her head slightly as she exhaled. It made her look like Marlene Dietrich. “Then, very recently, something happened. I don’t know what, he wouldn’t tell me, though I begged him to.”
She regarded him through the smoke haze for some moments. Any member of an intelligence organization had to maintain a stone facade that revealed nothing of their inner thoughts or feelings. But through her eyes he could see her mind working, and he knew that she had let her guard down.
“Tell me, Jason, as a long-time friend of Alex’s, do you ever remember him being frightened?”
“No,” Bourne said. “Alex was utterly fearless.”
“Well, that day he was frightened. That’s why I begged him to tell me what it was, so I could help, or at least convince him to move himself out of harm’s way.”
Bourne leaned forward, his body now as tense as Mlle. Dutronc’s had been before. “When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Did he tell you anything at all?”
“There was a name he mentioned, Felix Schiffer.”
Bourne’s pulse began to race. “Dr. Schiffer worked for DARPA.”
She frowned. “Alex told me that he worked for the Tactical Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.”
“That’s an Agency adjunct,” Bourne said, half to himself. Now the pieces were starting to fall together. Could Alex have convinced Felix Schiffer to leave DARPA for the Directorate? Surely, it would not have been difficult for Conklin to make Schiffer “disappear.” But why would he want to? If he was merely poaching on DOD territory, he could’ve handled the resulting flak. There had to be another reason Alex needed to get Felix Schiffer to ground.
He looked at Mylene. “Was Dr. Schiffer the reason Alex was frightened?”
“He wouldn’t say, Jason. But how could it be otherwise? That day, Alex made and received many calls in a very short period of time. He was terribly tense and I knew he was at the crisis point of a hot field operation. I heard Dr. Schiffer’s name mentioned several times. I suspect that he was the subject of the operation.”
Inspector Savoy sat in his Citroën, listening to the scraping sound of his wind
shield wipers. He hated the rain. It had been raining the day his wife had left him, the day his daughter had gone off to school in America, never to return. His wife was living in Boston now, married to a straight-laced investment banker. She had three children, a house, property, all that she could wish for, while here he was sitting in this shitty town—what was its name? ah, yes, Goussainville—biting his nails down to the quick. And, to top it off, it was raining again.
But today was different because he was closing in on the CIA’s most wanted target. Once he got Jason Bourne, his career would skyrocket. Perhaps he’d come to the attention of the president himself. He glanced over at the car across the street—Minister Jacques Robbinet’s Peugeot.
From the Quai d’Orsay files, he had retrieved the make, model and license plate of the minister’s car. His fellow officers had informed him that upon exiting the airport checkpoint the minister had headed north onto the A1. After having ascertained from headquarters who had been assigned to the northerly section of the dragnet, he had methodically called each car—mindful of Lindros’ warning, keeping away from radio transmission, whose frequency wasn’t secure. None of his contacts had seen the minister’s car, and he was working himself up into a fit of despair when he had gotten to Justine Bérard, who told him that, yes, she had seen Robbinet’s car—had spoken to him briefly—at a gas station. She remembered because the minister seemed tense, nervous, even a bit rude.
“Did his behavior strike you as odd?”
“Yes, it did. Though I didn’t make much of it at the time,” Bérard had said. “Though now, of course, my thinking has changed.”
“Was the minister alone?” Inspector Savoy asked.
“I’m not certain. It was raining hard and the window was up,” Bérard said. “To be candid, my attention was on Monsieur Robbinet.”
“Yes, a handsome specimen,” Savoy said, more dryly than he had intended. Bérard had been a great help. She had seen the direction in which the minister’s car had gone, and by the time he had arrived in Goussainville, she had found it sitting outside a block of concrete apartment buildings.
Mlle. Dutronc’s eyes strayed to Bourne’s throat and she stubbed out her cigarette. “Your wound has begun bleeding again. Come. We must take care of it.”
She led him into her bathroom, tiled in sea-green and cream. A small window overlooking the street let in the dismal light of day. She sat him down and began to wash the wound with soap and water.
“The bleeding has subsided,” she said as she applied antibiotic to the reddened flesh across his throat. “This wound wasn’t accidental. You were in a fight.”
“It was difficult getting out of the States.”
“You’re as tight-lipped as Alex.” She stood a little back, as if she needed to get him in better focus. “You are sad, Jason. So very sad.”
“Mlle. Dutronc—”
“You must call me Mylene. I insist.” She had fashioned an expert bandage from sterile gauze and surgical tape and now applied it to his wound. “And you must change the dressing at least every three days, yes?”
“Yes.” He responded to her smile. “Merci, Mylene.”
She put a hand gently against his cheek. “So very sad. I know how close you and Alex were. He thought of you as a son.”
“He said that?”
“He didn’t have to; he had a special look on his face when he spoke about you.” She examined the dressing one last time. “So I know I’m not the only one hurting.”
Bourne felt the urge, then, to tell her everything, that it wasn’t just the deaths of Alex and Mo affecting him, but the encounter with Khan. In the end, however, he remained silent. She had her own grief to bear.
Instead, he said, “What’s the deal with you and Jacques? You act as if you hate each other.”
Mylene looked away for a moment, toward the small window with its pebbled glass, running now with rain. “It was brave of him to bring you here. It must have cost him much to ask for my help.” She turned back, her gray eyes brimming. Alex’s death had brought so much emotion to the surface, and at once he intuited that her own past was being churned up by the restless ocean of present events. “So much sorrow in this world, Jason.” A single tear rolled from her eye, lay quivering on her cheek, before sliding down. “Before Alex, you see, there was Jacques.”
“You were his mistress?”
She shook her head. “Jacques was not yet married. We were both very young. We made love like crazy, and because we were both young—and foolish—I became pregnant.”
“You have a child?”
Mylene wiped her eyes. “Non, I wouldn’t have it. I didn’t love Jacques. It took what happened to make me see that. Jacques did love me, and he—well, he’s so very Catholic.”
She laughed, a little sadly, and Bourne recalled the story Jacques had told him of Goussainville’s history and how the barbarian Franks had been won over by the church. King Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism had been a shrewd decision, but it had been more a matter of survival and politics than of faith.
“Jacques has never forgiven me.” There was no self-pity in her, making her confession all the more affecting.
He leaned in and tenderly kissed her on both cheeks, and with a small sob she drew him briefly to her.
She left him to shower, and when he was finished, he found a French military uniform piled neatly on the toilet seat. As he dressed, he peered out the window. A linden’s branches swung back and forth in the wind. Below him, a handsome woman in her early forties got out of her car, walked down the street to a Citroën in which a man of indeterminate age sat behind the wheel, gnawing obsessively at his fingernails. Opening the passenger’s-side door, she slid in.
There was nothing particularly unusual about the scene, except for the fact that Bourne had seen the same woman at the gas station. She had spoken to Jacques about the air pressure in her tire.
Quai d’Orsay!
Quickly, he went back into the living room, where Jacques was still on the phone. The moment the minister saw Bourne’s expression, he got off his call.
“What is it, mon ami?”
“We’ve been made,” Bourne said.
“What? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, but there are two Quai d’Orsay agents across the street in a black Citroën.
Mylene walked in from the kitchen. “Two more are watching the street behind. But don’t worry, they cannot even know which building you’re in.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang. Bourne drew his gun but Mylene’s eyes flashed their warning. She jerked her head and Bourne and Robbinet moved out of sight. She opened the door, saw a very rumpled inspector in front of her.
“Alain, bonjour,” she said.
“I’m sorry to intrude on your vacation,” Inspector Savoy said, a sheepish grin on his face, “but I was sitting outside and all of a sudden I remembered that you lived here.”
“Would you like to come in, have a cup of coffee?”
“Thank you, no. I can’t spare the time.”
Greatly relieved, Mylene said, “And what were you doing sitting outside my house?”
“We’re looking for Jacques Robbinet.”
Her eyes opened wide. “The Minister of Culture? But why would he be in, of all places, Goussainville?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Inspector Savoy said. “Nevertheless, his car is parked across the street.”
“The inspector is too clever for us, Mylene.” Jacques Robbinet strode into the living room buttoning his white shirt. “He has found out about us.”
With her back turned to Savoy, Mylene shot Robbinet a look. He returned it, smiling easily.
His lips brushed hers, as he came up beside her.
By this time Inspector Savoy’s cheeks had grown warm. “Minister Robbinet, I had no idea…that is, there was no intention to intrude—”
Robbinet raised a hand. “Apology accepted, but why are you looking for me?”
With
an overt show of relief, Savoy handed over the grainy photo of Jason Bourne. “We’re searching for this man, Minister. A known CIA assassin who’s turned rogue. We have reason to believe that he means to kill you.”
“But that’s terrible, Alain!”
To Bourne, observing this charade from the shadows, Mylene looked shocked indeed.
“I don’t know this man,” Robbinet said, “nor why he would want to take my life. But then who can fathom the minds of assassins, eh?” He shrugged, turned as Mylene handed him his jacket and raincoat. “But by all means, I’ll return to Paris as quickly as possible.”
“With us as an escort,” Savoy said firmly. “You’ll ride with me and my associate will drive your official car.” He held out his hand. “If you would be so kind.”
“As you wish.” Robbinet delivered the key to his Peugeot. “I’m in your hands, Inspector.”
Then, he turned, took Mylene in his arms. Savoy discreetly withdrew, saying he would wait in the hallway for Robbinet.
“Take Jason down to the car park,” Robbinet whispered in her ear. “Take my attaché case with you and give him the contents just before you leave him.” He whispered the combination to her and she nodded.
She stared up at him, then she kissed him hard on the mouth and said, “Godspeed, Jacques.”
For just an instant, his eyes opened wide in response. Then he was gone, and Mylene went quickly through the living room.
She called softly to Bourne, and he appeared. “We must make the most of the advantage Jacques has given you.”
Bourne nodded. “D’accord.”
Mylene grabbed Robbinet’s attaché case. “Come now. We must hurry!”
She opened the front door, peered out to ensure that the way was clear, then led him down to the underground car park. She stopped just inside the metal-clad door. Peering through the wire-reinforced glass pane, she reported back to him. “The car park looks clear, but be vigilant, you never know.”
She unlocked the attaché case, held out a packet. “Here is the money you requested, along with your identity card and your orders. You’re Pierre Montefort, a courier due to hand over top-secret documents to the military attaché in Budapest not later than eighteen hundred hours, local time.” She dropped a set of keys into Bourne’s palm. “A military motorcycle is parked in the third rank, next-to-last space on the right.”
The Bourne Legacy Page 19
