The morning passed slowly.
A few people came and went from the building, but Abbey stayed inside. Farnham didn’t leave the car, and he smoked his way through half a pack of cigarettes as he sat there. Bourne eyed the street for other surveillance, but he didn’t see anyone else covering the neighborhood. It seemed to be just the two of them.
Then, around twelve-thirty, a newcomer attracted his attention. A woman panhandler shuffled down the north side of Rue d’Auteuil, cupping her palm at everyone she passed and demanding change. She wore a multicolored skirt that draped to her ankles and a heavy crocheted black sweater that was too long for her arms. Her thick black hair fell to the middle of her back, with half a dozen red plastic butterflies braided into the strands. She wore round yellow glasses that kept slipping down her nose. Her back was hunched. When she got to the corner, she stopped, accosting every pedestrian who passed her and swearing at those who didn’t give her money.
“Cochon riche! Est-ce que je suis trop sale pour vous?”
The panhandler noticed Farnham in the Mercedes, and with a snort of derision, she approached the car. Bourne saw her stuff her left hand inside the open window. The encounter didn’t last long, no more than a few seconds, and then the woman backed away with another curse and disappeared around the corner onto Rue Saint-Louis.
Maybe it was an innocent exchange. Maybe not.
Had she passed Farnham a message?
Jason didn’t have time to think about it, because only a couple of minutes later, Abbey Laurent finally reappeared. She turned right out of the building along Rue Saint-Louis, and her pace was quick, as if she needed to get somewhere. Bourne waited for the Treadstone agent in the Mercedes to take up the chase, but the man made no move to get out of the car.
Why not?
There was no way Farnham could have missed her, and yet he was letting her go. Seconds passed. Then a minute. Then two.
Something was wrong.
Bourne headed toward the Mercedes. Inside the car, Farnham still hadn’t moved. Bourne listened for the sound of the man talking on the phone, reporting Abbey’s position to another agent, but there was no noise from the interior. Jason came up slowly on the open window. If Farnham saw Bourne, he’d recognize him, but it couldn’t be helped. He reached the door of the sedan and shot a quick glance at the Treadstone agent, and then he froze where he was.
Farnham’s eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving.
Jason leaned inside the car window. He pulled aside the flap of Farnham’s suit coat and saw a slit in the man’s white shirt directly over his heart and a bloodstain spreading across the fabric.
It was a perfect, precise attack, a single killing thrust with a knife through the ribs and into the heart and lungs.
The panhandler was an assassin.
And now she was after Abbey Laurent.
Bourne spun away from the Mercedes and into Rue Saint-Louis, which was jammed with people taking their lunch breaks. Time had passed since he’d seen Abbey leave. Too much time. He’d let her get too far ahead of him. Looking down the sidewalk, he couldn’t pick her out, and he half walked, half ran, shoving his way through the crowd and offering excuses in French.
Where was she?
He hurried under the yellow awnings of the quaint stone buildings. Canadian flags snapped over his head. A backup of cars filled the street. He passed doorway after doorway of gift shops, restaurants, and hotels, the volume of people thickening as he neared the tourist heart of the city. Still he couldn’t find Abbey, and by now she could be anywhere. She could already be dying in a doorway on one of the side streets, a knife in her chest.
Ahead of him, the street ended in the shadows of Château Frontenac. The statue of Champlain rose over the plaza.
There!
Just for an instant, he spotted a woman darting between the stopped cars, and he saw a flash of red and blue as she passed out of sight. It was her. Bourne ran again, and two blocks later, the street opened into the wide-open plaza that led to the Dufferin Terrace. The castle-like walls of the hotel loomed over his head. Hundreds of people milled in the square, and Abbey was lost in the crowd.
He didn’t like it. Crowds were dangerous. People squeezed together, people shouting and laughing, people bumping into each other. One collision was all the killer needed to plunge in the knife. No one would see a thing.
Bourne pushed people aside, going faster and faster through the plaza. The sun was blinding, and the bodies around him were a blur of motion. Men and women passed back and forth in his line of sight, blocking his view. His senses shot into overdrive, feeding him information faster than his brain could process it. Every time he saw red—a red T-shirt, a red balloon, a red backpack—he froze to see if it was Abbey Laurent. But he couldn’t find her. Then his eyes locked onto a familiar flash of color. Not red. This was a quick, swirling rainbow of fabric. The panhandler. He recognized her multicolored skirt, the butterflies in her hair, her black sweater—a sweater in which she had a bloody knife secured in one of the sleeves. The woman wasn’t shuffling anymore, and her back was no longer hunched. She moved through the crowd with deadly intent. As Bourne watched, she disappeared through glass doors that led into the funicular connecting the upper and lower towns of Quebec City.
She was following Abbey.
He used a gap in the crowd to bolt for the green-and-white building with the huge sign overhead: Funiculaire. When he got there, he wrenched open the glass door and shoved past the people in front of him to get down the stairs. Half a dozen people were already waiting for the next car to take them down the sharp slope to the Basse-Ville. He saw the back of Abbey’s head; she was at the front, ready to board as the doors opened. Four people back, eyes focused like a laser on Abbey Laurent, was the panhandler, with her hands invisible inside the long arms of her sweater.
One couple was ahead of Jason in the ticket queue. An American in a Chicago Cubs jacket hunted for coins to pay the fare for him and his wife. Jason saw one of the funicular cars rising into view, approaching the station. He was running out of time. When the doors opened, Abbey and the others would board, and the funicular car would descend the cliffside. By the time it got to the bottom, she would have a knife wound in her heart, and her lungs would be filling with blood.
“Non, monsieur, sept, sept,” the ticket clerk told the American. “Seven. It is seven dollars for the two of you.”
“Seven dollars? That’s outrageous!” The man turned to his wife. “I think we should walk. For seven bucks? Let’s take the stairs.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Chuck, just pay the man, will you? My feet are tired as it is.”
Grumbling, the man in the Cubs jacket handed over a twenty-dollar Canadian bill.
While the clerk dug in the drawer for change, the doors of the funicular opened. The people inside disembarked. When the car was empty, Jason saw Abbey Laurent walk through the open doors to the far side and stand in front of the windows. The car was small. People squeezed in behind her. Bourne saw the panhandler nudging toward the front, positioning herself for the kill.
Finally, the couple in front of him finished paying. Jason threw a five-dollar bill down without waiting for change. He headed for the turnstile that led to the funicular, but the American couple blocked his way.
“It’s crowded,” the man told his wife, pointing at the car. “Look at how many people are on there. Let’s just wait for the next one.”