While the tailor hurried into the shop to confront the agents, Bourne ran silently down the filthy corridor. He hoped Fine would be able to hold up under their questioning; otherwise he'd be finished. The bathroom was larger than he would have expected. To the left was an old porcelain sink beneath which were a stack of old paint cans, the tops rusted shut. A toilet was set against the rear wall, a shower to the left. Following Fine's instructions, he stepped into the shower, located the panel in the tile wall, opened it. He stepped through, replacing the tile panel.
Raising his hand, he pulled the old-fashioned light cord. He found himself in a narrow passage that looked to be in the adjacent building. The place stank; black plastic garbage bags had been stuffed between the rough wooden studs, possibly in lieu of insulation. Here and there, rats had scratched their way through the plastic, had gorged themselves on the rotting contents, left the rest spilling out onto the floor. By the meager illumination provided by the bare bulb he saw a painted metal door that opened out onto the alley behind the stores. As he made his way toward it, the door burst open and two Agency suits sprinted through, guns drawn, their eyes intent on him.
CHAPTER SIX
The first two shots flew over Bourne's head as he ducked into a crouch. Coming out of it, he kicked hard at a plastic bag of garbage, sending it flying toward the two agents. It struck one and came apart at the seam. Refuse flew everywhere, sending the agents backward, coughing, their eyes streaming, arms over their faces. Bourne struck upward, shattering the light bulb, plunging the narrow space into darkness. He turned and, flicking on his flashlight, saw the blank wall at the other end of the passageway. But there was a doorway to the outside, how... ?
Then he saw it and immediately extinguished the narrow beam of light. He could hear the agents shouting to each other, regaining their equilibrium. He went quickly to the far end of the passageway and knelt, feeling for the metal ring he had seen in a dull glint lying flush with the floor. He hooked his forefinger through it, pulled up, and the trap door to the cellar opened. A waft of stale, damp air came to him. Without a moment's hesitation, he levered himself through the opening. His shoes struck the rung of a ladder and he went down, closing the trap door behind him. He smelled the roach spray first, then, switching on his flashlight, saw the gritty cement floor littered with their withered bodies like leaves on the ground. Rooting around in the splay of boxes, cartons and crates, he found a crowbar. Racing up the ladder, he slid the thick metal bar through the grips on the hatch. It was not a good fit; the crowbar remained loose, but it was the best he could hope for. All he needed, he thought, as he crunched across the roach-littered concrete floor, was enough time to get to the sidewalk delivery access common in all commercial buildings.
Above his head, he could hear the hammering as the two agents tried to open the hatch. It would not take long, he knew, for the crowbar to slip free under such vibration. But he had found the double metal panels to the street, had climbed the short flight of concrete steps that led upward. Behind him, the hatch burst open. He switched off his flashlight as the agents dropped to the basement floor.
Bourne was trapped now, and he knew it. Any attempt to lift the metal panels would bring in enough daylight for them to shoot him before he was halfway to the sidewalk. He turned, crept down the stairs. He could hear them moving around, looking for the light switch. They were speaking to each other in brief, staccato undertones, marking them as seasoned professionals. He crept along the jumbled piles of supplies. He, too, was looking for something specific.
When the lights snapped on, the two agents were spread apart, one on either side of the basement.
"What a shithole," one of them said.
"Never mind that," the other cautioned. "Where the fuck's Bourne?" With their bland, impassive faces there was not much to distinguish them. They wore Agency-issue suits and Agency-issue expressions with equal assurance. But Bourne had had much experience with the people the Agency swept into its nets. He knew how they thought and, therefore, how they would act. Though not physically together, they moved in concert. They would not give much thought to where he might hide. Rather they had mathematically divided the basement into quadrants they would search as methodically as machines. He could not now avoid them, but he could surprise them. Once he appeared, they would move very fast. He was counting on this and so positioned himself accordingly. He had wedged himself into a crate, his eyes smarting from the fumes of the caustic industrial cleansers with which he shared the cramped space. His hand scrabbled around in the darkness. Feeling something curved against the back of his hand, he picked it up. It was a can, heavy enough for his purpose. He could hear his heart beating, a rat scratching at the wall against which the crate rested; all else was silent as the agents continued their painstakingly thorough search. Bourne waited, patient, coiled. His lookout, the rat, had ceased its scratching. At least one of the agents was near.
It was deathly quiet now. Then, all at once, the quick catch of a breath came to him, the rustle of fabric nearly directly above his head, and he uncoiled, popping the lid off. The agent, gun in hand, reared back. His partner, across the basement, whirled. With his left hand, Bourne grabbed a handful of the nearest agent's shirt, jerked him forward. Instinctively, the agent pulled back, resisting, and Bourne lunged forward, using the agent's own momentum to slam his spine and head against the brick wall. He could hear the rat squeak even as the agent's eyes rolled up and he slid down, unconscious. The second agent had taken two steps toward Bourne, thought better of engaging him hand-to-hand and aimed the Clock at his chest. Bourne threw the can into the agent's face. As he recoiled, Bourne closed the gap between them, drove the edge of his hand into the side of the agent's neck, felling him.
An instant later, Bourne was up the concrete stairs, opening the metal panels into fresh air and blue sky. Dropping the panels back into place, he calmly walked down the sidewalk until he reached Rosemont Avenue. There, he lost himself in the crowd.
A half-mile away, after assuring himself that he had not been followed, Bourne went into a restaurant. As he was seated at a table, he scanned every face in the room, searching for anomalies—feigned nonchalance, covert scrutiny. He ordered a BLT and a cup of coffee, then got up and headed toward the rear of the restaurant. Determining the men's room was empty, he locked himself in a cubicle, sat down on the toilet and opened the envelope meant for Conklin that Fine had given him.
Inside, he found a first-class airline ticket in Conklin's name to Budapest, Hungary, and a room key for the Danubius Grand Hotel. He sat looking at the items for a moment, wondering why Conklin had been on his way to Budapest and whether the trip had anything to do with his murder.
He took out Alex's cell phone, dialed a local number. Now that he had a direction, he felt better. Deron picked up after the third ring.
"Peace, Love and Understanding."
Bourne laughed. "It's Jason." He never knew how Deron was going to answer the phone. Deron was quite literally an artist at his trade. It just happened that his trade was forgery. He made his living painting copies of Old Master oils that hung on mansion walls. They were so exacting, so expert that every so often one was sold at auction or ended up in a museum collection. On the side, just for the fun of it, he forged other things.
"I've been following the news on you and it has a distinctly ominous tone," Deron said, in his slight British accent.
"Tell me something I don't know." At the sound of the men's room door opening, Bourne paused. He stood up, put his shoes on either side of the toilet, peered over the top of the stall. A man with gray hair, a beard and a slight limp had bellied up to the urinal. He wore a dark suede bomber jacket, black slacks, nothing special. And yet, all at once Bourne felt trapped. He had to curb his desire to get out immediately.
"Damn, is the man on your ass?" It was always interesting to hear argot coming out of that cultured mouth.
"He was, up until I lost him.." Bourne left the bathroom and went back into the
restaurant, scanning every table as he went. By this time his sandwich had come, but his coffee was cold. He flagged down the waitress, asked for it to be replaced. When she had walked away, he said softly into the phone, "Listen, Deron, I need the usual—passport and contact lenses in my prescription, and I need them yesterday."
"Nationality?"
"Let's keep it American."
"I get the idea. The man won't expect that."
"Something like that. I want the name on the passport to be Alexander Conklin." Deron gave a low whistle. "It's your call, Jason. Give me two hours."
"Do I have a choice?"
Deron's odd little giggle exploded down the line. "You can go away hungry. I have all your photos. Which one d'you want?"
When Bourne told him, he said, "Are you sure? You've got your hair shaved down to the nub. Doesn't look like you at all now."
"It will when I get through with my makeover," Bourne replied. "I've been put on the Agency hit list."
"Number one with a bullet, I shouldn't think. Where should we meet?" Bourne told him.
"Good enough. Yo, listen, Jason." Deron's tone was abruptly more somber. "That must have been tough. I mean, you saw them, didn't you?"
Bourne stared at his plate. Why had he ordered this sandwich? The tomato had a raw and bloody look. "I saw them, yes." What if he could somehow roll back time, make Alex and Mo reappear? That would be quite a trick. But the past stayed the past, receding further from memory with every day.
"It's not like Butch Cassidy"
Bourne did not say a word.
Deron sighed. "I knew Alex and Mo, too."
"Of course you did. I introduced you," Bourne said, as he closed the phone. He sat at the table for a while, thinking. Something was bothering him. An alarm bell had gone off in his head as he had exited the men's room, but he had been distracted by his conversation with Deron and so he had not taken full note of it. What was it? Slowly, carefully, he scanned the room again. Then he had it. He did not see the man with the beard and slight limp. Perhaps he had finished his meal and had been on his way out. On the other hand, his presence in the men's room had made Bourne distinctly uneasy. There was something about him----He threw some money onto the table and went to the front of the restaurant. The two windows that looked out onto the street were separated by a wide mahogany pillar. Bourne stood behind it, using it as a screen while he checked the street. Pedestrians were first—anyone walking at an unnaturally slow pace, anyone loitering, reading a newspaper, standing too long in front of the shop window directly across the street, possibly scanning it for the reflection of the restaurant's entrance. He saw nothing suspicious. He marked three people sitting inside parked cars—one woman, two men. He could not see their faces. And then, of course, there were the cars parked on the restaurant side of the street.
Without a second thought, he went out onto the street. It was late morning and the crowd was denser now. That suited his current needs. He spent the next twenty minutes surveilling his immediate environment, checking doorways, storefronts, passing pedestrians and vehicles, windows and rooftops. When he'd satisfied himself that the field contained no Agency suits, he crossed the street, went into a liquor store. He asked for a bottle of the Speyside sherry-cask single-malt that had been Conklin's drink. While the proprietor went to fetch it, he looked out the window. No one in any of the cars parked on the restaurant side of the street. As he watched, one of the men he had noted got out of his car, went into a pharmacy. He had neither a beard nor a limp. He had nearly two hours before he had to meet Deron, and he wanted to use the time productively. The memory of the Paris office, the voice, the half-remembered face that had been pushed aside by the exigencies of current circumstance, had now returned. According to Mo Panov's methodology, he needed to inhale the Scotch again in order to pull out more of the memory. In this way, he hoped to try to find out who the man in Paris was and why the particular memory of him had surfaced now. Had it been simply the scent of the single-malt, or was it something in his current predicament that had provoked it?
Bourne paid for the Scotch with a credit card, feeling he was safe enough using it in a liquor store. A moment later, he exited the store with his package. He passed the car with the woman inside. A small child was sitting next to her in the passenger's seat. Since the Agency would never allow a child to be used on an active field surveillance, that left the second man as a possibility. Bourne turned, walking away from the car in which the man sat. He did not look behind him, did not try to use any covert methods of spying or the standard procedures for shaking a tail. He did keep track of all the cars immediately in front and behind him, however.
Within ten minutes, he had reached a park. He sat down on a wrought-iron bench, watched the pigeons rise and fall, wheeling against the blue sky overhead. The other benches were perhaps half-full. An old man came into the park; he held a brown bag as crumpled as his face from which he extracted handfuls of bread crumbs. The pigeons, it seemed, had been expecting him, for they swooped down, swirling around him, cooing and clucking in delight as they gorged themselves.
Bourne opened the bottle of single-malt, sniffed its elegant and complex aroma. Immediately, Alex's face flashed before him, and the slow creep of blood over the floor. Gently, almost reverently, he set this image aside. He took a small sip of the Scotch, holding it on his palate, allowing the fumes to rise up into his nose, to bring him back to the shard of memory he was finding so elusive. In his mind's eye, he saw again the view out onto the Champs-Elysées. He was holding the cut-crystal glass in his hand, and as he took another sip of the Scotch, he willed himself to bring the glass to his lips. He heard the strong, operatic voice, willed himself to turn back into the Paris office where he had been standing an unknown time ago.
Now, for the first time, he could see the plush appointments of the room, the painting by Raoul Dufy of an elegant horse and rider in the Bois de Boulogne, the dark green walls with their deep luster, the high cream ceiling etched in the clear, piercing light of Paris. Go on, he urged himself. Go on-----A patterned carpet, two high-backed upholstered chairs, a heavy polished walnut desk in the Regency style of Louis XIV, behind which stood, smiling, a tall, handsome man with worldly eyes, a long Gallic nose and prematurely white hair. Jacques Robbinet, French Minister of Culture. That was it! How Bourne knew him, why they had become friends and, in a sense, compatriots, was still a mystery, but at least now he knew that he had an ally he could contact and count on. Elated, Bourne put the Scotch bottle underneath the bench, a gift for the first vagrant who noticed it. He looked around without seeming to. The old man had gone and so had most of the pigeons; just a few of the largest ones, chests puffed out to protect their territory, were strutting around, scrounging the last of the crumbs. A young couple were kissing on a nearby bench; three kids with a boombox passed through, made lewd noises at the snuggled couple. His senses were on high alert—something was wrong, out of place, but he could not figure out what it was.
He was keenly aware that the deadline to meet Deron was fast approaching, but instinct warned him not to move until he had identified the anomaly. He looked again at all the people in the park. No bearded man, certainly none with a limp. And yet... Diagonally across from him was a man sitting forward, elbows on knees, hands together. He was watching a young boy whose father had just handed him an ice cream cone. What interested Bourne was that he was dressed in a dark suede bomber jacket and black slacks. His hair was black, not gray, he had no beard, and by the normal way his legs were bent, Bourne was certain that he didn't have a limp.
Bourne, himself a chameleon, an expert in disguise, knew that one of the best methods of keeping hidden was to change your gait, especially if one was trying to hide from a professional. An amateur might notice superficial aspects such as hair color and clothes, but to a trained agent the way you moved and walked was as individual as a fingerprint. He tried to bring up the image of the man in the restaurant men's room. Had he been wearing a wig and fake b
eard? Bourne couldn't be sure. What he was certain of, though, was that the man had been wearing a dark suede bomber jacket and black slacks. From this position he couldn't see the man's face, but it was clear that he was far younger than the man in the men's room had appeared.
There was something else about him, but what was it? He studied the side of the man's face for several moments before he had it. A flash image of the man who'd jumped him in the woods of Conklin's estate came to him. It was the shape of the ear, the deep brownish color, the configuration of the whorls.
Good God, the thought, abruptly disoriented, this was the man who'd shot at him, who'd almost succeeded in killing him in the Manassas cave! How had he trailed Bourne all the way from there when Bourne had given the slip to every Agency and state trooper in the area? He felt a momentary chill run through him. What kind of man could do that?
He knew there was only one way to find out. Experience told him that when you are up against a formidable foe the only way to get a true measure of him is to do the last thing he would expect. Still, for a moment, he hesitated. He'd never been up against an antagonist like this. He understood that he had crossed over into unknown territory. Knowing this, he rose and slowly and deliberately crossed the park and sat down beside the man, whose face he now saw had a distinctly Asian cast to it. To his credit, the man did not start or give any overt indication of surprise. He continued to watch the little boy. As the ice cream started to melt, his father showed him how to turn the cone to lick up the drippings.
"Who are you?" Bourne said. "Why do you want to kill me?" The man beside him looked straight ahead, gave no sign at all that he had heard what Bourne had said. "Such a beatific scene of domestic bliss." There was an acid edge to his voice. "I wonder if the child knows that at a moment's notice his father could abandon him."
Bourne had an odd reaction to hearing the other's voice in this setting. It was as if he had moved out of the shadows to fully inhabit the world of those around them.
Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy Page 10