“I’m coming up Beaumarchais,” Bourne murmured into the microphone. “I’ll leave the signal at the Métro stop. Once I do that, I’ll head to the hotel and wait. Are the cameras working?”
Vandal replied from her position at a café across the street from the Temple du Marais. “Roger that. I can see everyone coming and going from the hotel, and we’ve got video coverage on both ends of the street.”
“Got it.”
Jason walked slowly toward the Place de la Bastille through a version of Paris he barely recognized. Most of the shops were closed, casualties of the latest unrest. The windows of the BNP Paribas bank were boarded up with plywood. He passed an abandoned taxi that had been turned upside down and set on fire, with a charred smell of smoke and rubber poisoning the air. At the corner, near the Colonne de Juillet, police in riot gear patrolled the plaza with automatic weapons.
It was as if La Vraie had already won the war. Paris was a ghost town.
He reached the café where he’d been sitting just a few days earlier, when the message from Vandal had sent him back to Zurich and the Drei Alpenhäuser. It seemed like a lifetime ago. That was when his world had turned upside down, like that burned taxi.
You’re being hunted, Cain.
The café was open despite the violence. They’d swept up the broken glass and hired a bored, overweight security guard to stand watch near the door. Someone had hung a handwritten sign on the shot-up window that read Baise les politiciens. Boire du vin.
Fuck the politicians. Drink wine.
One of the waitresses at the café recognized him and waved. He nodded back at her. He could have sat outside and ordered his steak au poivre the way he always did when he was looking for a message from Abbey. A message that never came.
But not today.
He approached the large sign for the Métro station that was mounted in front of the escalators. The sign included a map of the Paris rail network and the name of the station—bastille—in white letters. He stood in front of it, his hands in his pockets, as if studying the route for his next trip. Then he slid an orange piece of chalk from his pocket and drew a small hashtag symbol on the sign.
It was done.
If the protocol was in place, someone would pass the Métro sign and take note of the hashtag and know that a message was waiting at a hotel a few blocks away.
If.
Bourne continued past the station. He turned right at the next street, which was Rue Saint-Antoine. The farther he walked from the Place de la Bastille, the more the city came back to life, crowded with people, cars, bicycles, and motorbikes. He made two sudden stops at store windows, and he crossed the street in front of a taxi that blared his horn at him, to confirm that no one was on his tail. The dirty gold stone and gray dome of the Temple du Marais loomed ahead of him. He passed a café at the corner and noted Vandal at one of the outside tables, a copy of the French edition of Marie Claire in her hands. She had a latte and an almond pastry in front of her, along with a phone in a bejeweled purple case. Her hair was loose and long. She wore a black jacket over a white shell, with jeans and high-heeled boots. Oversized rose-colored sunglasses covered her eyes.
They didn’t acknowledge each other.
Bourne turned the corner. Rue Castex was quiet, which made his footsteps on the pavement sound loud. He crossed the street and walked beside the old stone wall of the Marais church. Pausing, he lit a cigarette, which gave him time to examine the doorways and windows of the buildings down the block. He saw nothing, and yet his instincts came to life, warning him of a trap.
You’re being watched.
How could that be? He didn’t see how anyone could know about this back door. It was his protocol. He’d picked the location; he’d set up the plan. There should have been only two other people who knew the details: Abbey Laurent and Monika Roth. Even the intermediaries who made the drops, whoever they were, had no way of connecting Cain to the messages that were being left.
Had Abbey told someone? No. Never.
Had Monika?
Jason frowned at the possibility. He wondered again: Who was Monika?
“Is there a problem?” Vandal murmured through his earpiece. She could see him frozen outside the church, smoke drifting from his cigarette.
“Who have you seen on the street today?” he asked.
“About a dozen people over the past hour. No one went into the hotel. A few people came out, but no one raised red flags for me.”
“Okay.”
Bourne had faith in Vandal’s observation skills, but he’d learned long ago to listen to his paranoia. Someone on this street, behind one of the windows, had him under surveillance. If they hadn’t passed Vandal coming or going, that meant they had already been in place, waiting for him to arrive.
And yet no one could have known he would come here.
No one except Abbey and Monika.
He crushed the cigarette under his shoe without smoking it and continued down the street. If he was being watched, the goal wasn’t to kill him, because anyone above him had an easy sniper’s shot as he neared the hotel. He narrowed his eyes, alert for movement or the swish of a curtain, but if there was a watcher, he or she betrayed nothing.
Ahead of him was the Temple Hotel, a narrow white building five stories tall. He was sure he’d been here before. When setting up a back door, he always scouted the location. Size was important—too big, and a message might get lost or forgotten; too small, and a strange request might raise suspicions. He would have stayed overnight to become familiar with the flow of guests and traffic. He would have tipped the staff to be sure that enough money greasing someone’s palm would make sure that a message could be left for a stranger and not get thrown away.
Yes, he’d been here before—but he didn’t remember it.
Would they remember him?
Bourne opened the glass door of the hotel and walked inside. The lobby was small, decorated with flowers, the walls adorned with sconce lights and hanging tapestries. There was no counter, just a wooden table with a registration book to welcome guests. A balding, fortysomething man staffed the table, wearing a short-sleeve white dress shirt that had grayed with age, and a paisley tie. He sized up Bourne with the uncanny French ability to recognize Americans, and he greeted him in English. But his face showed no recognition that they’d met before.
“Hello, monsieur. Welcome to the Temple Hotel. How may I assist you?”
Jason added a little Texas twang to his voice and adopted one of his usual covers. “The name is Briggs. Charlie Briggs. I was hoping you’d have a room available.”
“Do you have a reservation?”
“No, no reservation. Just one bed is all I need.”
“I see. Yes, we do have a room available, but…”
His voice trailed off. The man took note of Bourne’s lack of luggage, and his mouth formed a little frown. Jason could see him anticipating the prospect of this crude American coming back with a prostitute in tow.
Jason allowed a little embarrassment on his face. “The truth is, I’m hoping I don’t actually have to spend the night. I mean, I’ll pay in advance, no problem about that. But this is my honeymoon trip, and my wife and I had a big fight this morning, and she told me in no uncertain terms to get my keister out of our hotel and not come back until I was ready to apologize.”
“Keister?” the man asked.
Bourne grinned and slapped his backside. “I guess you’d call it the derriere over here.”
“Ah. Oui, I understand.”
“I figure an expensive dinner, nice bottle of wine, and we’ll be good to go, but if not, I’d like to make sure I have a place to sleep tonight. So anyway, one room, see voo play. How much will that be?”
The hotel clerk quoted him a price. Bourne dug in his pocket for a wrinkled stash of euro, and as he pulled out his hand, the bills fluttered to the floor. He squatted down with a curse and began gathering them up, and as he stood up again, he affixed a miniature receiver the size of a postage stamp to the underside of the registration table. Then he counted out the bills and added a couple hundred euro to what he gave the man.
“There’s a little extra in there for ya.”
“Merci beaucoup.”
Jason smiled. Yes, this was the perfect place for a back door.
“Say, mind if I ask you a question?” he went on. “On the QT, as it were. Antree nouz.”
“Of course, sir. How can I help?”
“I noticed a very lovely woman at a restaurant up the street yesterday. In fact, I spent a little too much time noticing her, if you catch my drift. That was part of what caused the fight with my wife. This woman, well, she was a looker, but in an upscale way, refined, upper-crust, know what I mean? Long, wavy blond hair, sad blue eyes, deep red lips. About forty-five or so, I guess. I heard her talking, and she sounded German, not French.”
He described Monika as the photograph from the Drei Alpenhäuser had showed her and hoped she still might look a little like that.
“I’m pretty sure I saw her come into this hotel,” Bourne went on. “Does she ring any bells with you? Do you know who she is?”
“I’m afraid not,” the clerk replied stiffly. “There’s no one staying here who matches that description.”
“Ah well, too bad. Heck, probably just as well that I not find her, right? I don’t need any more trouble at home.”
The man handed Bourne a room key, and he headed for the hotel stairs. There was no elevator. He climbed to the second floor and let himself inside a small room with an arched ceiling and painted timbers lining the walls. In addition to a single bed, there was a writing desk and a chair, which he pulled to the casement window. He opened the window to see the street below him, and then he synched the app on his phone to listen to the microphone in the lobby of the hotel. From inside his jacket, he took out a small but powerful pair of binoculars, which he used to study the windows in the buildings across the street.
If anyone was surveilling him from there, they were well hidden.
“I’m in position,” he murmured to Vandal. “Are you picking up the lobby sound?”
“Loud and clear. Was that Monika you were describing?”
“Yeah. It was a shot in the dark.”
“Did he recognize her?”
“Maybe. If he did, she paid him not to remember her.”
“So now what?”
“Now we wait,” Bourne said.
The wait lasted the rest of the day.
For several hours, he listened to the dialogue of people checking in and out of the hotel, but none of the conversations raised suspicions with him. At one o’clock, the clerk went to lunch. A young woman took over the registration desk and spent most of the time on the phone discussing her sex life with a level of explicit detail that made Vandal groan through the microphone in Bourne’s ear.
But as the afternoon wore on, no one took the bait. No one came into the hotel to ask about messages.
Until six o’clock.
At six o’clock, Vandal reported a young woman in a tailored business suit and sky-high heels entering the hotel. She went to the desk—the original clerk was back on duty—and told the man that she understood a message was waiting for a woman named Marella Vaughn.
In the room overhead, Bourne felt the breath escape from his chest. He should have expected this, but it still came as a shock.
Marella Vaughn. Yes, of course.
The woman downstairs was here to collect a message from Jason—but not for Monika. Marella Vaughn was the false name Abbey had chosen, the name under which he would reach out to her in an emergency. Abbey was still following the protocol. Every day, she sent someone past the Bastille station to look for a sign that a message was waiting at this hotel. And now, for the first time, the sign had been there—but there was no message.
Jason wondered if the woman would contact Abbey and let her know. Of course she would. Any lawyer would report a deviation in the norm to her client.
The signal was there, but there was no message.
What would she think?
“Cain?” Vandal asked, interrupting his thoughts. “Is this it? Is this the courier?”
“No. This is something else.”
From the window, Jason watched the woman in the business suit exit the hotel and head toward the far end of Rue Castex. A part of him wanted to break cover and catch up with her. Give her a message. Tell her to tell Abbey that Jason says—
What?
What could he say?
There was nothing in the world he could say that wouldn’t turn Abbey’s life upside down, and he wasn’t going to do that.
“Hang on,” Vandal said in his ear.
“What is it?”
“We’ve got another visitor. Opposite direction. I like the look of him.”
Bourne checked the street. He saw the man that Vandal meant, and he agreed with her instincts. This wasn’t a tourist; this was a man on a mission. He was in his fifties, medium height, stocky build, with a receding hairline and gray beard. His face had the sunken lines of alcohol and age, but he wore a gray suit that was tailored and expensive. He looked successful but not smooth, not corporate. If he was a lawyer, Bourne suspected that he represented a rougher kind of client.
“He’s going in,” Vandal said.
Jason heard the noise of the hotel’s front door. He thought about going downstairs to the lobby to see this man and watch how he behaved. But he couldn’t do that. Whoever the man was, he might be prepped to look for someone matching Cain’s description.
He listened to the clerk greeting him.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Puis-je vous aider?”
“Do you have a message for Patricia Tuile?” the man asked. “I’m supposed to pick up a note that was left for her here.”
“Tuile?” Vandal asked Jason through the radio. “Is that the code name for Monika?”
“It has to be her,” he replied. “This is our guy.”
Ten years later—and the protocol was still in place. Monika was still waiting for him to make contact.
“Non, je regrette, pas de message,” the clerk replied.
There was a long pause on the microphone downstairs.
“Rien?” the man asked, his voice turning harsh and suspicious. Nothing?
“Non, monsieur.”
“Es-tu sûr?”
“Oui, il n’y a pas de message. Et je ne connais pas cette femme Patricia Tuile. Elle n’est pas une cliente de l’hôtel.”
The clerk was certain. No message. No Patricia Tuile staying at the hotel.
Another long pause followed, and Bourne knew what the man was thinking. This made no sense. The hashtag had been placed on the sign at the Bastille station. The note should have been there! Something was wrong!
He’d leave the hotel and report the situation to his client.
There is a problem. We’re being played!
But that was exactly what Bourne wanted. Once the man had made contact, he and Vandal would track him back to Monika.
“Get ready to follow him,” Jason said into the radio.
“On it.”
But then Bourne heard the man’s voice through the microphone again. The courier sounded strangely calm for someone who’d just had a decade-old messaging protocol turned on its head.
“Ah, well, apparently the message hasn’t been dropped off yet. I will try again tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d like to leave a note with you from Ms. Tuile. Would five hundred euro make sure this gets to the man who comes to collect it?”
“Certainement,” the clerk replied. “And who will pick it up?”
“His name is David Webb.”