'What we're told to do. And so will you.'
'What? That was Peter I He was your friend! Listen to me, Alan...'
'No!' The interruption was harsh. 'You listen. Get out of Paris. Now! Take the next direct flight back here. If you have any problems the embassy will clear them, but you're to talk only to the ambassador, is that understood?'
'No!' screamed Marie St Jacques. 'I don't understand! Peter was killed and nobody cares! All you're saying is bureaucratic bullshit! Don't get involved; for God's sake, don't ever get involved!'
'Stay out of it, Marie!'
'Stay out of what! That's what you're not telling me, isn't it? Well, you'd better...'
'I can't!' Alan lowered his voice. 'I don't know. I'm only telling you what I was told to tell you.'
'By whom?'
'You can't ask me that*
'lam asking I*
'Listen to me, Marie. I haven't been home for the past twenty-four hours. I've been waiting here for the last twelve for you to call. Try to understand me, I'm not suggesting you come back. Those are orders from your government.'
'Orders? Without explanations?'
'That's the way it is... I'll say this much. They want you out of there; they want him isolated ... That's the way it is.'
'Sorry, Alan! That's not the way it is! Good-bye!' She slammed the receiver down, then instantly gripping her hands to stop the trembling. Oh, my God, she loved him so ... and they were trying to kill him. Jason, my Jason, they all want you killed. Why?
The conservatively dressed man at the switchboard snapped the red toggle that blocked the lines, reducing all incoming calls to a busy signal. He did so once or twice an hour, if only to clear his mind and expunge the empty inanities he had been required to mouth during the past minutes. The necessity to cut off all conversation usually occurred to him after a particularly tedious one; he had just had it. The wife of a Deputy trying to conceal the outrageous price of a single purchase from her husband by breaking it up into several. Enough! He needed a few minutes to breathe.
The irony struck him. It was not that many years ago when others sat in front of the switchboards for him. At his companies in Saigon and in the communications room of his vast plantation in the Mekong Delta. And here he was now in front of someone else's switchboard in the perfumed surroundings of Saint-Honore. The English poet said it best: there were more preposterous vicissitudes in life than a single philosophy could conjure.
He heard laughter on the staircase and looked up. Jacqueline was leaving early, no doubt with one of her celebrated and fully bank-rolled acquaintances. There was no question about it, Jacqueline had a talent for removing gold from a well-guarded mine, even diamonds from De Beers. He could not see the man with her; he was on the other side of Jacqueline, his head oddly turned away.
Then for an instant he did see him; their eyes made contact; it was brief and explosive. The grey-haired switchboard operator suddenly could not breathe; he was suspended hi a moment of disbelief, staring at a face, a head, he had not seen in years! And then almost always in darkness, for they had worked at night... died at night.
Oh, my God, it was him! From the living - dying - nightmares thousands of miles away. It was him!
The grey-haired man rose from the switchboard as if in a trance. He pulled the mouthpiece-earphone off and let it drop to the floor. It clattered as the board lit up with incoming calls that made no connections, answered only by discordant hums. The middle-aged man stepped off the platform, and sidestepped his way quickly towards the aisle to get a better look at Jacqueline Lavier and the ghost that was her escort. The ghost who was a killer - above all men he had ever known, a killer. They said it might happen, but he had never believed them; he believed them now! It was the man.
He saw them both clearly. Saw him. They were walking down the centre aisle towards the entrance. He had to stop them. Stop her\ But to rush out and yell would mean death. A bullet in the head, instantaneous.
They reached the doors; he pulled them open, ushering her out to the pavement. The grey-haired man raced out from his hiding place, across the intersecting aisle and down to the front window. Out in the street he had flagged a taxi. He was opening the door, motioning Jacqueline to get inside. Oh, God I She was going!
The middle-aged man turned and ran as fast as he could towards the staircase. He collided with two startled customers and a salesgirl, pushing all three violently out of his way. He raced up the steps, across the balcony and down the corridor, to the open studio door.
'Rend! Rend!' he shouted, bursting inside.
Bergeron looked up from his sketch board, astonished. 'What is it?'
That man with Jacqueline! Who is he? How long has he been here?'
'Oh? Probably the American,' said the designer. 'His name's Briggs. A fatted calf; he's done very well by our grosses today.'
'Where did they go?'
'I didn't know they went anywhere.'
'She left with him!'
'Why?'
'He knows I He'll kill her!'
"What?
'It's him ! I'd swear to it! That man is Cain!'
15
'The man is Cain,' said Colonel Jack Manning bluntly, as if he expected to be contradicted by at least three of the four civilians at the Pentagon conference table. Each was older than he, and each considered himself more experienced. None was prepared to acknowledge that the army had obtained information where his own organization had failed. There was a fourth civilian but his opinion did not count He was a member of the Congressional Oversight Committee, and as such to be treated with deference, but not seriously. 'If we don't move HOW,' continued Manning, 'even at the risk of exposing everything we've learned, he could slip through the nets again. As of eleven days ago, he was in Zurich. We're convinced he's still there. And, gentlemen, it is Cain.'
'That's quite a statement,' said the balding, bird-like academic from the National Security Council as he read the summary page concerning Zurich given to each delegate at the table. His name was Alfred Gillette, an expert in Personnel Screening and Evaluation, and he was considered by the Pentagon to be bright, vindictive, and with friends in high places.
'I find it extraordinary,' added Peter Knowlton, an associate director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man in his middle fifties who perpetuated the dress, the appearance, and the attitude of an Ivy League of thirty years ago. 'Our sources have Cain in Brussels, not Zurich, at the same time - eleven days ago. Our sources are rarely in error.'
'That's quite a statement,' said the third civilian, the only one at that table Manning really respected. He was the oldest there, a man named David Abbott, a former Olympic swimmer whose intellect had matched his physical prowess. He was in his late sixties now, but his bearing was still erect, his mind as sharp as it had ever been, his age, however, betrayed by a face lined from the tensions of a Lifetime he would never reveal. He knew what he was talking about, thought the colonel. Although he was currently a member of the omnipotent Forty Committee, he had been with the C.I.A. since its origin in the OSS. The Silent Monk of Covert Operations had been the sobriquet given him by his colleagues in the intelligence community. 'In my days at the agency,' continued Abbott, chuckling, 'the sources were as often in conflict as in agreement.'