The Bourne ultimatum (73 page)

“It wasn’t a conspiracy, for Christ’s sake!”

“It wasn’t exactly a pure rapport between the home office and the field, was it? No, Aleksei Nikolae Konsolikov, you knew you could—shall we say—use me and you did. Never forget, my fine old adversary, you
are
Russian.”

“Will you two shut up and get
out
of here?”

They waited in Krupkin’s armor-plated Citroën on the edge of an overgrown field a hundred feet behind the old man’s car, the front of the restaurant in clear sight. To Bourne’s annoyance, Conklin and the KGB officer reminisced like two aging professionals dissecting each other’s strategies in past intelligence operations, pointing out the deficiencies each held to be with the other’s. The Soviet backup was a nondescript sedan on the far shoulder of the road diagonally across from the restaurant. Two armed men were ready to leap out, their automatic weapons prepared to fire.

Suddenly, a Renault station wagon pulled up to the curb in front of the inn. Three couples were inside; all but the driver got out, all laughing, playfully entwining their arms. They walked with abandon toward the entrance as their companion drove the car into the small side parking lot.

“
Stop
them,” said Jason. “They could be killed.”

“Yes, they could be, Mr. Bourne, but if we stop them we will lose the Jackal.”

Jason stared at the Russian, unable to speak, the harsh winds of anger and confusion clouding his thoughts. He started to utter a protest but could not do so; the words would not come. Then it was too late for words. A dark brown van shot up the road from the highway to Paris and Bourne found his voice.

“It’s the one from the boulevard Lefebvre, the one that got away!”

“The one from
where
?” asked Conklin.

“There was trouble on Lefebvre several days ago,” said Krupkin. “An automobile or a truck was blown up. Do you refer to that?”

“It was a trap. For me. ... A van, then a limo, and a double for Carlos—a trap. That’s the second one; it raced out of a dark side street, I think, and tried to cut us down with firepower.”

“Us?” Alex watched Jason; he saw the undisguised fury in the Chameleon’s eyes, the tight, rigid set of his mouth, the slow spreading and contraction of his strong fingers.

“Bernardine and me,” whispered Bourne in reply, suddenly raising his voice. “I want a
weapon
,” he cried. “The gun in my pocket isn’t a goddamned weapon!”

The driver was Krupkin’s powerfully built Soviet aide Sergei; he reached across his seat and pulled up a Russian AK-47. He held it over his shoulder as Jason grabbed it.

A dark brown limousine, its tires skidding on the backcountry road, screamed to a stop in front of the faded, worn canopy; and like trained commandos, two men leaped out of the side door, their faces encased in stocking masks, their hands holding automatic weapons. They raced to the entrance, each spinning his body to either side of the double doors. A third man emerged from the squared vehicle, a balding man in a priest’s black clothing. With a gesture of his weapon, the two assault troops spun back toward the doors, their hands on the thick brass knobs. The driver of the van gunned his engine in place.

“
Go
!” yelled Bourne. “It’s him! It’s
Carlos
!”

“
No
!” roared Krupkin. “Wait. It’s our trap now, and he must be trapped—
inside
.”

“For Christ’s sake, there are people in there!” countered Jason.

“All wars have casualties, Mr. Bourne, and in case you don’t realize it, this is war. Yours and mine. Yours is far more personal than mine, incidentally.”

Suddenly, there was an earsplitting scream of vengeance from the Jackal as the double doors were crashed back and the terrorists rushed inside, their weapons on automatic fire.

“
Now
!” cried Sergei, the ignition started, the accelerator on the floor. The Citroën swung out on the road, rushing toward the van, but in a split half second its progress was derailed. A massive explosion took place on the right. The old man and the nondescript gray car in which he sat was blown apart, sending the Citroën swerving to the left into the ancient post-and-rail fence that bordered the sunken parking lot on the side of the inn. The instant it happened the Jackal’s dark brown van, instead of racing forward, lurched backward, jerking to a halt as the driver jumped out of the cab, concealing himself behind it; he had spotted the Soviet backup. As the two Russians ran toward the restaurant the Jackal’s driver killed one with a burst from his weapon. The other threw himself into the bordering, sloping grass, watching helplessly as Carlos’s driver shot out the tires and the windows of the Soviet vehicle.

“Get
out
!” yelled Sergei, pulling Bourne from the seat onto the dirt by the fence, as his stunned superior and Alex Conklin crawled out behind him.

“Let’s
go
!” cried Jason, gripping the AK-47 and getting to his feet. “That son of a bitch blew up the car by remote.”

“I’ll go first!” said the Soviet.

“Why?”

“Frankly, I’m younger and stronger—”

“Shut up!” Bourne raced ahead, zigzagging to draw fire, then plummeting to the ground when it came from the driver of Carlos’s van. He raised his weapon in the grass, knowing that the Jackal’s man believed his fusillade had been accurate; the head appeared and then was no more as Jason squeezed the trigger.

The second Russian backup, hearing the death cry from behind the van, rose from the sloping grass and continued toward the restaurant’s entrance. From inside came the sound of erratic gunfire, sudden bursts accompanied by screams of panic, followed by additional bursts. A living nightmare of terror and blood was taking place within the confines of a once bucolic country inn. Bourne got to his feet, Sergei at his side; running, they joined the other surviving Soviet aide. At Jason’s nod, the Russians pulled back the doors and as one they burst inside.

The next sixty seconds were as terrifying as the shrieking hell depicted by Munch. A waiter and two of the men who were among the three couples were dead, the waiter and one man sprawled on the floor, their skulls shattered, what was left of their faces lying in blood; the third man was splayed back in the banquette, his eyes wide and glass-dead, his clothes riddled with bullets, rivulets of blood rolling down the fabric. The women were in total shock, alternately moaning and screaming as they kept trying to crawl over the pine walls of the booth. The well-dressed man and wife from the Italian embassy were nowhere in sight.

Sergei suddenly rushed forward, his weapon on auto fire; in a rear corner of the room he had spotted a figure whom Bourne had not seen. The stocking-faced killer sprang out of the shadows, his machine swinging into position, but before he could exercise his advantage, the Soviet cut him down. ...
Another
! A body lurching behind the short counter that served as a bar. Was it the
Jackal
? Jason pivoted into the diagonal wall, crouching, his eyes darting into every recess in the vicinity of the wine racks. He lunged to the base of the bar as the second Russian backup, assessing the situation, ran to the hysterical women, spinning around, his gun swinging back and forth protecting them. The stocking-faced head shot up from behind the counter, his weapon surging out over the wood. Bourne sprang to his feet, gripping the hot barrel with his left hand, his right commanding the AK-47; he fired point-blank into the terrorist’s contorted face beyond the silk. It was
not
Carlos. Where was the
Jackal
?

“In
there
!” shouted Sergei as if he had heard Jason’s furious question.

“
Where
?”

“Those doors!”

It was the country restaurant’s kitchen. Both men converged on the swinging doors. Again Bourne nodded, the signal for them to crash inside, but before they could move, both were partially blown back by an explosion from within; a grenade had been set off, with fragments of metal and glass embedded in the doors. The smoke billowed, wafting out into the dining room; the smell was acrid, sickening.

Silence.

Jason and Sergei once more approached the kitchen’s entrance, and once again they were stopped by a second sudden explosion followed by staccato gunfire, the bullets piercing the thin, louvered panels of the swinging doors.

Silence.

Standoff.

Silence.

It was too much for the furious, impassioned Chameleon. He cracked the bolt of his AK-47, pulled the selective lever and then the trigger for auto fire, and crashed the doors open, lunging for the floor.

Silence.

Another scene from another hell. A section of the outside wall had been blown away, the obese owner and his chef, still wearing his toque, were dead, corpses pinned against the lower shelves of the kitchen, blood streaming across and down the wood.

Bourne slowly rose to his feet, his legs in agony, every nerve in his body frayed, the edge of hysteria not far away. As if in a trance, he looked around through the smoke and the debris, his eyes finally settling on a large, ominous fragment of brown butcher’s paper nailed to the wall with a heavy cleaver. He approached it and, yanking out the cleaver, read the words printed in a black butcher’s pencil:

The trees of Tannenbaum will burn and children will be the kindling. Sleep well, Jason Bourne
.

The mirrors of his life were shattered into a thousand pieces of glass. There was nothing else to do but scream.

“
Stop
it, David!”

“My God, he’s insane, Aleksei. Sergei, grab him, hold him. ...
You
, help Sergei! Put him on the ground so I can talk to him. We must leave here quickly!”

It was all the two Russian aides could do to wrestle the screaming Bourne to the grass. He had raced out through the exploded hole in the wall, running into the high grass in a futile attempt to find the Jackal, firing his AK-47 into the field beyond until his magazine was empty. Sergei and the surviving backup had rushed in after him, the former ripping the weapon out of Jason’s hands, together leading the hysterical man back to the rear of the mutilated country inn, where Alex and Krupkin were waiting for them. Forcibly, their charge in a sweating, erratically breathing trance, the five men walked rapidly to the front of the restaurant; there the uncontrollable hysteria again seized the Chameleon.

The Jackal’s van was gone. Carlos had reversed his line of flight and escaped and Jason Bourne had gone mad.

“
Hold
him!” roared Krupkin, kneeling beside Jason as the two aides pinned Bourne to the ground. The KGB officer reached down and spread his hand across the American’s face, gouging his cheeks with thumb and forefinger, forcing Treadstone Seventy-one to look at him. “I’ll say this
once
, Mr. Bourne, and if it doesn’t sink in, you may stay here by yourself and take the consequences! But we must leave. If you get hold of yourself, we’ll be in touch with the proper officials of your government within the hour from Paris. I’ve read the warning to you and I can assure you your own people are capable of protecting your family—as your family was explained to me by Aleksei. But you,
yourself
, must be part of that communication. You can become rational, Mr. Bourne, or you can go to hell. Which will it be?”

The Chameleon, straining against the knees pinning him to the ground, exhaled as if it were his final breath. His eyes came into focus and he said, “Get these bastards off me.”

“One of those bastards saved your life,” said Conklin.

“And I saved one of theirs. So be it.”

The armor-plated Citroën sped down the country road toward the Paris highway. On the scrambled cellular telephone, Krupkin ordered a team to Epernon for the immediate removal of what was left of the Russian backup vehicle. The body of the slain man had been placed carefully in the Citroën’s trunk, and the official Soviet comment, if asked for, was one of noninvolvement: Two lower-level diplomatic staff had gone out for a country lunch when the massacre occurred. Several killers were in stocking masks, the others barely seen as the staff members escaped through a back door, running for their lives. When it was over they returned to the restaurant, covering the victims, trying to calm the hysterical women and the lone surviving man. They had called their superiors to report the hideous incident and were instructed to inform the local police and return at once to the embassy. Soviet interests could not be jeopardized by the accidental presence at the scene of an act of French criminality.

“It sounds so
Russian
,” Krupkin said.

“Will anyone believe it?” Alex wondered.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered the Soviet. “Epernon reeks of a Jackal reprisal. The blown-apart old man, two subordinate terrorists in stocking masks—the Sûreté knows the signs. If we were involved, we were on the correct side, so they won’t pursue our presence.”

Bourne sat silently by the window. Krupkin was beside him with Conklin in the jump seat in front of the Russian. Jason broke his angry silence, taking his eyes off the rushing scenery and slamming his fist on the armrest. “Oh, Christ, the
kids
!” he shouted. “How could that
bastard
have
learned
about the Tannenbaum house?”

“Forgive me, Mr. Bourne,” broke in Krupkin gently. “I realize it’s far easier for me to say than for you to accept, but very soon now you’ll be in touch with Washington. I know something about the Agency’s ability to protect its own, ,and I guarantee you it’s maddeningly effective.”

“It can’t be so goddamned great if Carlos can penetrate this far!”

“Perhaps he didn’t,” said the Soviet. “Perhaps he had another source.”

“There weren’t any.”

“One never knows, sir.”

They sped through the streets of Paris in the blinding afternoon sun as the pedestrians sweltered in the summer heat. Finally they reached the Soviet embassy on the boulevard Lannes and raced through the gates, the guards waving them on, instantly recognizing Krupkin’s gray Citroën. They swung around the cobblestone courtyard, stopping in front of the imposing marble steps and the sculptured arch that formed the entrance.