"Forget it, lady," answered Bourne. "You're going out of here limp-a Sister of Charity being helped, not assaulted, by a stranger. You're about to have a fainting spell. At your age it's a fairly common occurrence, isn't it?"

"Wait."

"Too late."

"We must talk!"

"We will." Releasing his arm, Jason instantly crashed both his hands simultaneously into the woman's shoulder blades where the tendons weave into the neck muscles. She collapsed; he caught her in the fall and carried her out of the narrow street as an adoring supplicant might a religious social worker. The dawn light was beginning to fill the sky, and several early risers, one a young jogger in shorts, converged on the man carrying the nun. "She's been with my wife and sick children for nearly two days without sleep!" pleaded the Chameleon in street French. "Will someone please find me a taxi so I can take her back to her convent in the ninth arrondissement?"

"I shall!" roared the young runner. "There's an all-night stand on the rue de Sèvres, and I'm very fast!"

"You are a gift, monsieur," said Jason, appreciating but instantly disliking the all too confident, all too young jogger.

Six minutes later the taxi arrived, the youth inside. "I told the driver you have money," he said, climbing out. "I trust it's so."

"Of course. And thanks."

"Tell the sister what I did," added the young man in running shorts, helping Bourne gently insert the unconscious woman into the back of the taxi. "I'll need all the help I can get when my time comes."

"I trust that's not imminent," said Jason, trying to return the youth's grin.

"Not likely! I represent my firm in the marathon." The overgrown child began running in place.

"Thanks again. I hope you win the next one."

"Tell the sister to pray for me!" cried the athlete, racing away.

"The Bois de Boulogne," said Bourne, closing the door and addressing the driver.

"The Bois? That ventilating nut told me it was an emergency! You had to get the nun to a hospital."

"She drank too much wine, what can I tell you?"

"The Bois de Boulogne," said the driver, nodding his head. "Let her walk it off. I have a second cousin in the Lyons convent. She gets out for a week she's soused to the temples. Who can blame her?"

The bench on the graveled path of the Bois progressively received the warm rays of the early sun as the middle-aged woman in the religious habit began shaking her head. "How are you doing, Sister?" asked Jason, sitting beside his prisoner.

"I believe I was struck by an army tank," replied the woman, blinking and opening her mouth to swallow air. "At least a tank."

"Which I suspect you know more about than a welfare wagon from the Magdalen Sisters of Charity."

"Quite so," agreed the woman.

"Don't bother to look for your gun," said Bourne. "I removed it from the very expensive belt under your habit."

"I'm glad you recognized the value. It's part of what we must talk about. ... Since I am not in a police station, I assume you've granted me my request to talk."

"Only if what you say suits my purpose, I assume you understand that."

"But it must, you see. Suit your purpose, as you say. I've failed. I've been taken. I'm not where I should be, and whatever the time is, the light tells me I'm too late for excuses. Also, my bicycle has either disappeared or is still chained to the lamppost."

"I didn't take it."

"Then I'm a dead woman. And if it's gone I'm just as dead, don't you see?"

"Because you've disappeared? Not where you're supposed to be?"

"Of course."

"You're Lavier!"

"That's true. I'm Lavier. But I'm not the woman you knew. You knew my sister Jacqueline-I am Dominique Lavier. We were close in age and since we were children strongly resembled each other. But you are not wrong about Neuilly-sur-Seine or what you saw there. My sister was killed because she broke a cardinal rule, committed a mortal sin, if you like. She panicked and led you to Carlos's woman, his most cherished and useful secret."

"Me? ... You know who I am?"

"All Paris-the Jackal's Paris-knows who you are, Monsieur Bourne. Not by sight, I grant you, but they know you are here and they know you're tracking Carlos."

"And you're part of that Paris?"

"I am."

"Good Christ, lady, he killed your sister!"

"I'm aware of that."

"Still you work for him?"

"There are times when a person's choices are considerably reduced. Say, to live or to die. Until six years ago when Les Classiques changed ownership, it was vital to the monseigneur. I took Jacqui's place-"

"Just like that?"

"It wasn't difficult. I was younger, and more to the point I looked younger." The lines in the middle-aged Lavier's face cracked with a brief pensive smile. "My sister always said it came with living on the Mediterranean. ... At any rate, cosmetic surgery is commonplace in the world of haute couture. Jacqui supposedly went to Switzerland for a face-lift ... and I returned to Paris after eight weeks of preparation."

"How could you? Knowing what you knew, how the hell could you?"

"I did not know earlier what I learned later, by which time it was irrelevant. By then I had the choice I just mentioned. To live or to die."

"It never occurred to you to go to the police or the Sûreté?"

"Regarding Carlos?" The woman looked at Bourne as if rebuking a foolish child. "As the British say in Cap Ferrat, surely you jest."

"So you blithely went into the killing game?"

"Not consciously. I was gradually led into it, my education slow, piecemeal. ... In the beginning I was told Jacqueline had died in a boating accident with her lover of the month and that I would be enormously well paid to carry on in her place. Les Classiques was far more than a grand salon-"

"Far more," agreed Jason, interrupting; "It was the drop for France's most highly classified military and intelligence secrets funneled to the Jackal by his woman, a celebrated general's wife."

"I was not aware of that until long after the general killed her. Villiers was his name, I believe."

"It was." Jason looked across the path at the still dark waters of a pond, white lilies floating in clusters. Images came back to him. "I'm the one who found him, found them. Villiers was in a high-backed chair, a gun in his hand, his wife lying on the bed, naked, bleeding, dead. He was going to kill himself. It was a proper execution for a traitor, he said, for his devotion to his wife had blinded his judgment and in that blindness he had betrayed his beloved France. ... I convinced him there was another way; it almost worked-thirteen years ago. In a strange house on Seventy-first Street in New York."

"I don't know what happened in New York, but General Villiers left instructions that after his death what happened in Paris was to be made part of the public record. When he died and the truth was known, it was said that Carlos went mad with fury, killing several high-ranking military commanders simply because they were generals."

"It's all an old story," interrupted Bourne sharply. "This is now, thirteen years later. What happens now?"

"I don't know, monsieur. My choices are zero, aren't they? One or the other of you will kill me, I suppose."

"Maybe not. Help me take him and you're free of both of us. You can go back to the Mediterranean and live in peace. You won't even have to disappear-you merely return to wherever it is after a number of profitable years in Paris."

"Disappear?" asked Lavier, studying the haggard face of her captor. "As in the word 'vanish'?"

"No need for that. Carlos can't reach you because he'll be dead."

"Yes, I understand that part. It's the disappearance that interests me along with the 'profitable' years. Does this profit come from you?"

"Yes."