Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Ultimatum

To chew up the minutes before calling Alex, he walked along the nearby boulevard Saint-Germain, making necessary purchases. Various toiletries joined several articles of clothing; casual denims called for summer shirts and a lightweight safari jacket; dark socks required tennis shoes, to be scuffed and soiled. Whatever he could supply himself now would save time later. Fortunately, there was no need to press old Bernardine for a weapon. During the drive into Paris from Orly, the Frenchman had opened the glove compartment of his car in silence, withdrawn a taped brown box and handed it to Jason. Inside was an automatic with two boxes of shells. Underneath, neatly layered, were thirty thousand francs, in varying denominations, roughly five thousand dollars, American.

"Tomorrow I will arrange a method for you to obtain funds whenever necessary. Within limits, of course."

"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.