Night fell an hour later. The lights of the city came alive.
When it was fully dark, Bourne hailed a cab near the Sorbonne and then used his Sig and two thousand euro to convince the scared driver to let him take the taxi for the night. He told the man where to pick up his vehicle in the morning and said another five thousand euro would be waiting in the glove box.
From there, he returned to the near-empty streets of Île Saint-Louis, where Vandal was waiting for him. He found her sitting in the doorway of a closed pharmacy, with a view on an elegant corner bistro called L’Îlot Vache. She handed him a pair of binoculars, and he focused on the brightly lit interior of the restaurant. He could see Christophe Chouat at a small round table, flirting with his young redheaded secretary over glasses of white wine.
“Any activity?” Bourne asked.
“Only under the table. Chouat’s been feeling up Little Miss Muffet between bites of escargot. What is it about French girls and daddy complexes?”
Bourne smiled. “Any phone calls or texts?”
“Plenty. His phone has been practically glued to his hand.”
“So Monika probably knows I got her message.”
“Probably,” Vandal agreed. “What about the woman on the bridge? What was that about? Could that have been her?”
“Maybe. I never saw her face. As soon as she realized I was onto her, she bolted.”
“Le Renouveau?”
“I don’t see how they could have found us that quickly.”
Vandal frowned. “What the fuck’s going on? Are we running the show here, Cain, or are we dancing to somebody else’s tune?”
“It could be both. All we can do for now is stay with the plan.”
“All right, what’s next?”
“It’s time to shake things up for our lawyer friend,” Bourne said. “We need to get Chouat off balance.”
“He works for the mob. He’ll be tough to rattle.”
“Not necessarily. Sooner or later in that biz, you know they’re going to come for you. Did you track down his phone number?”
“Yeah. I gave it a wrong number call earlier just to be sure. It’s him.”
Bourne retrieved his burner phone. He keyed in the number that Vandal gave him, and then he tapped out a text to Christophe Chouat.
You’re being watched.
He pushed to send the message and used the binoculars to focus on the lawyer inside L’Îlot Vache. The man heard the buzz of his phone and retrieved it from the restaurant table. His mouth puckered with concern as he read the message. He grabbed his glass and gulped wine and took a casual look around the half-full bistro.
Then Chouat keyed in a reply. Who is this?
Bourne ignored the question and sent another message. Don’t tell the girl anything.
He watched the lawyer check his phone as the next message arrived. When he did, the man’s bloodshot eyes focused on the young girl with the big lips and overdone blush. She smiled and made a kiss at him, but when she reached for his hand, he pulled it away from her.
Why not? the lawyer texted.
Why do you think, Christophe? Do you think she fucks you for free? She’s a spy, you fool.
Vandal glanced at the exchange on Bourne’s phone. “Aw. Someone’s not getting laid tonight.”
“We need the girl out of there,” Jason said. “She’s a complication.”
Bourne focused on Chouat again. As the man read the latest message, the wrinkles on his forehead deepened, and the bags under his eyes seemed to get heavier in the shadows. Sweat glistened on his face in the flickering candlelight. The lawyer studied the girl darkly, as if replaying their entire relationship in his head. She blinked in confusion at the new, hostile expression on his face. She leaned forward, putting her hand on his knee, but he peeled away her fingers.
The lawyer tapped out a new message. Who the hell are you?
Your friends sent me, Bourne replied.
What friends?
Oh, for God’s sake, Chouat. Do you think we’re not always watching you?
He could see the man breathing harder now. The lawyer’s shirt collar seemed to choke him, and he wrestled it with his fingers. His eyes shifted to the door of the restaurant and then to the windows, as if expecting gunmen to storm inside or a bomb to go off in a hail of flying glass.
Bullets. Bombs. A knife in the alley. When you were a mob lawyer, you never knew how the end would come.
I’ve been loyal! You know that!
Bourne took a chance. Then why have you made new alliances?
New alliances? My God, what are you talking about?
Jason texted: Le Renouveau.
He watched the man’s fingers fly on his phone. That is mad! Insane! Me in bed with those maniacs? Never!
You’re doing their bidding.
I am not. I swear I am not! Why do you think that?
The hotel on Rue Castex.
Again Chouat studied the bistro in fear, trying to identify whoever was watching him. His secretary put a palm softly on his face—“Mon cher, quel est le problème?”—and Bourne watched him slap her wrist down to the table and hiss at her to be quiet. His fingers assaulted the keyboard of the phone.
The hotel? That is nothing! What about it?
The hotel is a drop for Le Renouveau. You are delivering messages for them.
Impossible! You are wrong!
Who is your client? Who sent you there?
I don’t know her. I don’t know her name. We have never met! I get a monthly retainer through a Swiss account. I check for a signal that tells me to go to the hotel, but until today, there has never been a signal. This was the first time!
And David Webb? Jason texted.
I delivered the message to him. That is all!
Chouat, don’t you know who Webb is? He is an assassin!
In the bistro, the lawyer paled as he read the latest message. The word wrapped itself around his mind. Assassin.
Jesus! I had no idea!
Where did the message come from?
It was waiting at my office this morning. I don’t know who delivered it, and I don’t know what it contained. I did not read it!
Bourne delivered another twist. We intercepted the message at the hotel. The note was instructions for a hit. A target. An account number for the funds. Le Renouveau is hiring Webb to kill for them.
I swear I did not know! What do I do?
Jason texted: First get rid of the girl.
In the bistro, Chouat snapped at his secretary and jerked a finger at the door. The girl pointed at her half-eaten dinner and began to complain, but the lawyer took his wineglass and poured it over her salmon tartare. That was enough. She slapped a hand across his face and stomped out of the restaurant.
Half a block away, Bourne watched the girl march down Rue des Deux Ponts in a spitting rage. Chouat had lost a secretary and a lover.
She’s gone! What now? What do you want from me?
You need to run, Chouat. Do you think Webb will let you live? You’re the link that connects the killer to his employers. The first thing he will do is get rid of you. He has already been following you! He was there tonight!
Oh my God!
Don’t go home. Don’t go to your office. He will have both places under surveillance.
My home? But my wife!
Give her an excuse, Chouat. You’re good at that. You weren’t planning to be home tonight anyway, were you? You must leave now.
Where? Where do I go?
Take a cab. Don’t take your car. It’s almost certainly wired with explosives. Go to the Hotel Mercure near Charles de Gaulle. Await further instructions.
Yes! Yes, okay!
Bourne put away his phone.
“Time for phase two,” he told Vandal, handing her the binoculars. “Chouat and I are going to take a little ride.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to his office and search it. See if you can find any client or bank records for Patricia Tuile. He claims not to know anything about who Monika is, but he could be covering for her. I’ll meet up with you later tonight.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Cain.”
Bourne didn’t answer. He returned to the stolen taxi, started the engine, and turned on the call light. He kept an eye on the door to L’Îlot Vache, inching the cab down the empty street and waiting for Chouat to appear. As he waited, he thought about other scared, nervous men he’d dealt with in his life. Antoine d’Amacourt—the Paris banker who’d been part of the money trail after he lost his memory. Carson Gattor—the New York lawyer who’d helped Bourne and Abbey make the connection to the Medusa group after he’d been framed for a congresswoman’s murder.
Pressured little men in over their heads.
In the lights outside the bistro, he saw the door fly open. Christophe Chouat hurried onto the sidewalk. The lawyer saw the light on Bourne’s cab and flagged him down.
“Where to, monsieur?” Bourne asked as the lawyer piled into the back of the cab and slammed the door shut.
“Hotel Mercure. It’s near de Gaulle.”
“Ah, fuck no, that’s out of my way,” Bourne told him, feigning reluctance in a guttural Marseilles accent. “I’m supposed to be off duty soon. Find another cab.”
“No! No, I’ll pay you whatever you want. Forget the meter. I’ll give you cash.”
“Cash?”
“Yes. Plus a tip. Twice the usual fare.”
“What the hell, okay.”
Bourne drove.
He kept an eye on his passenger in the rearview mirror as Chouat slumped low in the seat and kept twisting around to stare through the rear window. The man flinched whenever he saw headlights. Bourne navigated off the island and crossed to the north side of the Seine, and when he reached the wide, tree-lined river road, he headed southeast. A mile later, signs ahead indicated the lane for the Périphérique, the highway that skirted the city, but Bourne took an exit before they got there. He swung the cab into the Parc de Bercy.
Chouat noticed the detour. “Hey, where are you going? This isn’t the way.”
“Accident,” Bourne told him. “An hour’s delay. We’ll pick up the highway near Vincennes.”
He sped through the deserted park, crossing under a series of pedestrian overpasses. On the other side of the park, a few blocks away, the road dipped into a tunnel below a maze of train tracks leading in and out of Gare de Lyon. Flickering overhead lights lit up the lanes like strobes. Halfway through the tunnel, Bourne suddenly twisted the wheel hard, driving up onto the adjacent sidewalk and pulling the cab next to the stone wall that supported the steel girders for the tracks. Before Chouat could react, Jason was out the driver’s door and in the back seat with the lawyer.
Chouat saw the Sig in Bourne’s hand. He grabbed for the passenger door on his right, but the door only opened a couple of inches before colliding with the stone wall. The lawyer’s eyes went wild with fear.
“Oh, fuck, who are you? Were you the one texting me? I did what you wanted!”
Bourne pointed the gun between the man’s eyes. “Once upon a time, my name was David Webb.”
“Webb? Jesus! You’re Webb? I swear, I know nothing! I didn’t read the note!”
“Shut up, Chouat.”
He waited as a train boomed like thunder on the tracks over their heads, making the taxi shake. The lawyer clapped his hands over his ears at the noise and tears leaked from his bloodshot eyes.
“Please,” he murmured. “Please, I delivered the note. That’s all! I don’t know anything else!”
“Where did the note come from?” Bourne asked.
“I have no idea! It was waiting at my office this morning. Someone pushed it through the mail slot.”
“How did you know what to do with it?”
“There were instructions,” Chouat went on quickly. “It said I should follow the protocol for the Patricia Tuile account.”
“On the phone, you said you didn’t know the client’s name.”
“The phone? My God, that was you? How did—”
“Patricia Tuile,” Jason snapped. “Tell me about the protocol.”
“Mademoiselle Tuile is the name on the account, but for God’s sake, I’m sure it is an alias! I do not know her real name! I do not even know whether it is really a woman. The protocol has been in place for years. Every day, I am to go past the sign for the Bastille station. If there is a hashtag on the sign in orange chalk, then I should stop at the hotel on Rue Castex, and there will be a message waiting under the name Patricia Tuile. Sometimes I go past the sign myself, and sometimes I send my secretary. But there has never been a signal to indicate a message. All these years, never!”
“Until today,” Bourne said.
“Yes! Yes! But it was strange. If my client wishes to leave a note, I am supposed to make the hashtag on the Métro sign myself. Then I take the note to the hotel for the recipient to collect. I planned to do that today, but when I passed the sign at Bastille, I saw that the hashtag was already there. Someone else had left the signal. That meant a note was supposed to be waiting for Patricia Tuile, but when I went to the hotel, there was nothing. So instead, I left the note—the note for you! If there was something wrong with the contents, it was not me. I only followed the protocol!”
The flashing lights in the tunnel sent Chouat’s face in and out of shadow.
“What if there had been a message for Patricia Tuile?” Bourne asked. “What do you do with it?”
“I make contact and await instructions on how to deliver it.”
“How do you make contact?”
“I have a phone number. Several times over the years, the number has changed. A new number is left at my office. That is all I know.”
“You call the number?”
“No, I send a text. I do not know who is on the other end!”
“What’s the number?”
The lawyer squirmed. “I don’t remember it. I’m terrible with numbers. I keep it written down at my office.”
Bourne shoved the barrel of the Sig into Chouat’s forehead. “I tolerate one lie. The second lie, and I pull the trigger.”
“Yes! Yes, all right! A new number arrived today along with the note of instructions. Plus—I don’t know what it means—plus a bottle of mead.”
“Mead?” Bourne asked, puzzled. “The drink?”
“Yes. No explanation—just a bottle of Lindisfarne Mead.”
“Does that usually happen?”
“No, never before. I put the new number in my phone, and then I destroyed the card.”
A new number.
Multiple new numbers over the years.
Had it started with Monika? Was it still Monika? Or had the protocol been intercepted? When spies broke a code, they usually kept it going to see who answered. That was smart tradecraft.
“Did you text her today?” Bourne asked. “Does she know what happened at the hotel?”
He nodded frantically. “Yes, of course. She is a client. When I got to my office, I used the number, and I texted her about the hashtag. I said there was no note waiting, but I had left the note for David Webb as instructed.”
“Did she reply?”
He shook his head. “I got nothing back.”
Jason dug into the man’s suit coat pocket and slid out his iPhone. “Get me the number.”
Chouat fumbled with the phone, using Face ID to unlock it. His fingers shook as he scrolled through the keys. “Here. Here it is! I put it under a different name. Not Tuile.”
Jason memorized the phone number. Then he called up the lawyer’s messaging app and confirmed the man’s story. Hours earlier, Chouat had sent an update to that number explaining what had happened at the hotel in Rue Castex. Whoever received the message had sent nothing back in reply.
Bourne noted the twelve digits and the UK country code: 44.
Was Monika hiding in England? How long had she been there?
But now he had a way to reach her. He had twelve digits to send her a message. Twelve digits to go back into a past he didn’t remember.
If it really was Monika on the other end of that number.
Bourne got out of the cab and flung Chouat’s phone into the traffic lane. A few seconds later, a van speeding through the tunnel hit the phone and smashed it into fragments of metal and glass.
“Get out of here,” he told the lawyer, leaning back through the open door. “If you hear anything more from Patricia Tuile, tell her David Webb needs to talk to her. It’s urgent. She’s in danger.”