The cabin was quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when the people who belong in them have just left.
Bourne stood at the table looking at the phone. Roger had set it between them when they came back inside — the encrypted handset from the Professor's gear, compact, clean, the redial memory presumably pointing somewhere that had been expecting a call from a man who was no longer going to make it.
Bourne picked it up. Turned it over. Pressed redial.
The line rang once. Twice. Then a young, measured voice: "Identify. State your operational code."
Bourne didn't identify. He kept his voice flat and level and stated the situation: the asset sent to Riom was dead. Whoever was on this terminal needed to start talking.
A pause. The line transferred.
The voice that came on was older, colder, and entirely composed, the voice of a man who had been managing disasters for a long time and had stopped being surprised by them.
"Hello, Jason," Alexander Conklin said. "I see you've been keeping busy."
"Who are you?"
"That's not the useful question," Conklin replied. "The useful question is what happens next. As I see it, you have two options. You come in, we assess the situation, and we resolve it cleanly. Or we keep going until one of us is satisfied."
"By 'satisfied' you mean I'm dead."
"I mean the operational leak is closed," Conklin said, with the tone of a man describing something administrative. "Talk to me, Jason. Tell me where you are. Let's resolve this together."
"She doesn't care much anymore," Bourne said. "Marie. She's dead."
Roger, standing in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded, kept his face completely neutral.
The lie was precise and deliberate — delivered in the flat affect of Treadstone training, a man reporting a fact rather than claiming one. On the other end of the line, Conklin's breathing changed in a way that said he was recalculating.
"I'm sorry," Conklin said, carefully. "What happened?"
"She was slowing me down," Bourne said. "I cleared the field."
A silence with its own specific texture, a man doing rapid arithmetic.
"I see," Conklin said finally. "Then how do we close this?"
"This afternoon. Five-thirty. Pont Neuf." Bourne's voice was flat and absolute. "You come alone. Stand in the centre of the bridge, remove your coat, face east. I'll dial this number again."
He pulled the battery before Conklin could respond.
Bourne set the disassembled phone on the table and looked at Roger.
"That's your play," Roger said.
"I need to see their deployment before I can counter. If he comes alone, he's ready to deal. If he brings the full unit--"
"He'll bring the full unit," Roger said.
"I know. But I need to see how he sets it up. The specific positions, the timing, the gaps." Bourne set the battery beside the phone. "You can't plan a counter to an ambush you haven't mapped."
Roger looked at him across the table at, the man who had played in the snow with two children three hours ago and just told a cold, precise lie to protect a woman who wasn't in the room to know he'd done it. Both things at the same time. Always had been.
He reached into his coat and produced the Walther P5. He set it on the table beside the phone.
"Compact, clean, close-quarters appropriate," Roger said. "It was the Professor's. He won't be needing it back."
Bourne picked it up. Checked the chamber. Verified the magazine with the practiced efficiency of muscle memory. Tucked it into his inner coat pocket.
"My condition," Roger said. "If anything goes sideways, every active operative holding Marie's photograph comes off the board. All of them. That's the price of my continued involvement."
"Agreed," Bourne said, without hesitation.
"Then we need to get back to Paris," Roger said. "We have about six hours before that bridge."
Bourne took one last look around the cabin, at the fairy lights still strung along the ceiling beams, at the decorated tree in the corner, at the child-sized boots by the door that Eamon's kids had left behind in the rush. The ordinary evidence of a life that had been interrupted and was, with any luck, going to be able to resume somewhere safer.
Then he picked up his canvas bag and walked out.
Roger followed, pulling the cabin door shut behind him. They found the sedan Eamon had left in the yard and Bourne got it running in under a minute without a key, and they drove south through the predawn dark with the mountains receding in the mirrors and Paris assembling itself ahead in the winter fog.
The plan took shape in the quiet of the car the way plans do when the people forming it have stopped needing to explain themselves to each other.
[Plz Drop Powerstones.]