| 2:42a |
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Jason proffered a ten-franc note, his
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Jason proffered a ten-franc note, his innocent eyes looking blankly at the highly suspicious
woman“Augh, take it,” she said, removing a phone from under her cash-register stand and
Robert Ludlum ?? THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
266
grasping the money“It has an extension so you can move to the wall, as they all doMen! Business
and the bed, it’s all you think about!”
He dialed the Pont-Royal and asked for his room, expecting Bernardine to pick up on the first or
second ringBy the fourth, he was concerned; by the eighth, he was profoundly disturbed
Bernardine was not there! Had Santos ? No, the Deuxième veteran was armed and knew how to
use his “deterrence”—there would have been at the least loud gunfire, at the last a room blown
apart by a grenadeBernardine had left under his own controlWhy?
There could be any one of several reasons, thought Bourne, handing back the telephone and
returning to his table outsideThe first and most wished for was news of Marie; the old intelligence
officer would not raise false hopes by detailing the nets he had spread throughout the city, but they
were there, Jason was sure of itBourne could not think of another reason, so it was best not to
think about BernardineHe had other pressing considerations, the most intensely pressing of his
lifeHe returned to the strong coffee and his notebook; every detail had to be exact
An hour later he finished his espresso, taking a sip of the cognac and spilling the rest on the
pavement under the usual soiled red tableclothHe left the café and the rue d’Alésia, turning right
and walking slowly, as a far older man might walk, toward the boulevard LefebvreThe closer he
came to the last corner, the more he became aware of the undulating, erratic sounds from
apparently different directionsSirens! The two-note sirens of the Paris police! What had
happened? What was happening? Jason abandoned his elderly gait and ran to the edge of the
building fronting the Lefebvre and the row of old stone housesInstantly, he was in shock, fury and
astonishment joining together in panicWhat were they doing?
Five patrol cars converged on the row of stone houses, each successively screeching to a halt in
front of the structure on the rightThen a large black police van appeared, swinging directly around
to face the two entrances of the building, its searchlight shooting out as a squad of black-uniformed
men with automatic weapons leaped into the street and took up crouching attack positions only
partially concealed by the patrol cars—an assault was in the making!
FoolsGoddamned fools! To give Carlos a warning was to lose the Jackal! Killing was his
profession; escape, his obsessionThirteen years ago Bourne had been told that Carlos’s huge
retreat in the village hills of Vitry-sur-Seine outside Paris had more false walls and concealed
staircases than a nobleman’s Loire chateau in the time of Louis XIVThe fact that no one had ever
determined which estate it was, or whom it was assigned to, did not vitiate the all too acceptable
rumorsAnd with three supposedly separated structures on the boulevard Lefebvre, it was also all
too acceptable to presuppose hidden underground tunnels linking each to the others
For Christ’s sake, who had done this? Had a terrible error been made? Had he and Bernardine
been so obtuse as to think the Deuxième or Peter Holland’s Paris station of the CIA had overlooked
tapping into his Pont-Royal telephone or bribed or enlisted the various relays of operators on the
hotel’s switchboard? If so, that obtuseness was rooted in an absolute: it was next to impossible to
tap a phone on short notice in a relatively small hotel without being detecte |