The Bourne Ultimatum

by Robert Ludlum

  “No limits,” Bourne had contradicted. “I’ll have Conklin wire you a hundred thousand, and then another hundred after that, if it’s necessary. You just tell him where.”

  “Of contingency funds?”

  “No. Mine. Thanks for the gun.”

  With both his hands holding the looped strings of shopping bags, he headed back to Montalembert and the hotel. In a few minutes it would be two in the afternoon in Washington, eight at night in Paris. As he walked rapidly down the street he tried not to think about Alex’s news—an impossible demand on himself. If anything had happened to Marie and the children, he’d go out of his mind! Yet what could have happened? They were back on Tranquility by now, and there was no safer place for them. There was not! He was sure of that. As he entered the old elevator and lowered the bags in his right hand so as to push the number of his floor and remove the hotel key from his pocket, there was a stinging sensation in his neck; he gasped—he had moved too fast, stretched the gut of a suture perhaps. He felt no warm trickle of blood; it was merely a warning this time. He rushed down the two narrow corridors to his room, unlocked the door, threw the shopping bags on the bed, and rapidly took the three necessary steps to the desk and the telephone. Conklin was true to his word; the phone in Vienna, Virginia, was picked up on the first ring.

  “Alex, it’s me. What happened? Marie …?”

  “No,” interrupted Conklin curtly. “I spoke to her around noon. She and the kids are back at the inn and she’s ready to kill me. She doesn’t believe a word I told her and I’m going to erase the tape. I haven’t heard that kind of language since the Mekong Delta.”

  “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.”

  * * *

  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.

  Food, however, would have to wait; there were things to take care of, and first on the list was to reach Bernardine, and then to learn the security status of the Pont-Royal hotel. He got to his feet, stiffly, unsteadily, numbness momentarily invading his legs and arms. He needed a hot shower, which was not to be had at the Avenir, then mild exercise to limber up his body, therapies unnecessary only a few years ago. He removed his wallet from his trousers, pulled out Bernardine’s card and returned to the bed to use the telephone beside it; he dialed.

  “Le canard had no visitors, I’m afraid,” said the Deuxième veteran. “Not even the hint of a hunter, which I presume is favorable news.”

  “It’s not until we find Panov—if we find him. The bastards!”

  “Yes, that must be faced. It’s the ugliest part of our work.”

  “Goddamn it, I can’t dismiss a man like Mo with ‘That must be faced’!”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m only remarking upon the reality. Your feelings are meaningful to you, but they don’t change reality. I did not mean to offend you.”

  “And I didn’t mean to mouth off. Sorry. It’s just that he’s a very special person.”

  “I understand.… What are your plans? What do you need?”

  “I don’t know yet,” answered Bourne. “I’ll pick up the car in the Capucines and an hour or so later I’ll know more. Will you be home or at the Deuxième Bureau?”

  “Until I hear from you I will stay in my flat and near my very unique telephone. Under the circumstances I prefer that you do not call me at the office.”

  “That’s an astonishing statement.”

  “I don’t know everyone these days at the Deuxième, and at my age, caution is not merely the better part of valor, it’s frequently a substitute. Besides, to call off my protection so swiftly might generate rumors of senility.… Speak to you later, mon ami.”

  Jason replaced the phone, tempted to pick it up again and reach the Pont-Royal, but this was Paris, the city of discretion, where hotel clerks were loath to give information over the telephone, and would refuse to do so with guests they did not know. He dressed quickly, went down to pay his bill, and walked out onto the rue Gay-Lussac. There was a taxi stand at the corner; eight minutes later he walked into the lobby of the Pont-Royal and up to the concierge. “Je m’appelle Monsieur Simon,” he said to the man, giving his room number. “I ran into a friend last night,” he continued in flawless French, “and I stayed at her place. Would you know if anyone came around looking for me, perhaps asking for me.” Bourne removed several large franc notes, his eyes telling the man he would pay generously for confidentiality. “Or even describing someone like me,” he added softly.

  “Merci bien, monsieur.… I understand. I will check further with the night concierge, but I’m sure he would have left a note for my personal attention if someone had come here seeking you.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Because he did leave such a note for me to speak with you. I’ve been calling your room since seven o’clock this morning when I came on duty.”

  “What did the note say?” asked Jason, his breathing on hold.

  “It’s what I’m to say to you. ‘Reach his friend across the Atlantic. The man has been phoning all night.’ I can attest to the accuracy of that, monsieur. The switchboard tells me that last call was less than thirty minutes ago.”

  “Thirty minutes ago?” said Jason, looking hard at the concierge and then at his watch. “It’s five A. M. over there … all night?”

  The hotel man nodded as Bourne started for the elevator.

  “Alex, for Christ’s sake, what is it? They told me you’ve been calling all—”

  “Are you at the hotel?” interrupted Conklin quickly.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Get to a public phone in the street and call me back. Hurry.”

  Again the slow, cumbersome elevator; the faded ornate lobby now half filled with Parisians talking manically, many heading for the bar and their prenoon apéritifs; and again the hot bright summer street outside and the maddening congested traffic. Where was a telephone? He walked rapidly down the pavement toward the Seine—where was a phone? There! Across the converging rue du Bac, a red-domed booth with posters covering the sides.

  Dodging the onslaught of automobiles and small trucks, all with furious drivers, he raced to the other side of the street and down to the booth. He sped inside, deposited a coin, and after an agonizing few moments during which he explained that he was not calling Austria, the international operator accepted his AT&T credit number and put the call through to Vienna, Virginia.

  “Why the hell couldn’t I talk from the hotel?” asked Bourne angrily. “I called you last night from there!”

  “That was last night, not today.”

  “Any news about Mo?”

  “Nothing yet, but they may have made a mistake. We may have a line on the army doctor.”

  “Break him!”

  “With pleasure. I’ll take off my foot and smash his face with it until he begs to cooperate—if the line on him is rumb.”

  “That’s not why you’ve been calling me all night, though, is it?”

  “No. I was with Peter Holland for five hours yesterday. I went over to see him after we ta
lked, and his reaction was exactly what I thought it would be, with a few generous broadsides in the bargain.”

  “Medusa?”

  “Yes. He insists you fly back immediately; you’re the only one with direct knowledge. It’s an order.”

  “Bullshit! He can’t insist I do anything, much less give me an order!”

  “He can cut you off, and I can’t do anything about it. If you need something in a hurry, he won’t deliver.”

  “Bernardine’s offered to help. ‘Whatever you need,’ those were his words.”

  “Bernardine’s limited. Like me, he can call in debts, but without access to the machine he’s too restricted.”

  “Did you tell Holland I’m writing down everything I know, every statement that was made to me, every answer to every question I asked?”

  “Are you?”

  “I will.”

  “He doesn’t buy it. He wants to question you; he says he can’t question pages of paper.”

  “I’m too close to the Jackal! I won’t do it. He’s an unreasonable son of a bitch!”

  “I think he wanted to be reasonable,” said Conklin. “He knows what you’re going through, what you’ve been through, but after seven o’clock last night he closed the doors.”

  “Why?”

  “Armbruster was shot to death outside his house. They’re calling it a Georgetown robbery, which, of course, it isn’t and wasn’t.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “There are a couple of other things you ought to know. To begin with, we’re releasing Swayne’s ‘suicide.’ ”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “To let whoever killed him think he’s off the hook, and, more important, to see who shows up during the next week or so.”

  “At the funeral?”

  “No, that’s a ‘closed family affair,’ no guests, no formal ceremony.”

  “Then who’s going to show up where?

  “At the estate, in one form or another. We checked with Swayne’s attorney, very officially, of course, and he confirmed what Swayne’s wife told you about his leaving the whole place to a foundation.”