The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  He was also notorious for his tough stance on Russia. He’d been on the ground as a twenty-six-year-old lawyer helping with the IAEA response to Chernobyl, and what he’d seen had convinced him that the entire Soviet system needed to be torn down like a Confederate statue. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’d supported a Western-style restructuring of the Russian economy, only to see the country slip back into authoritarianism and oppression under the iron grip of Vladimir Putin.

  For years, Cafferty had pushed a hard line on Russia. Now, under the new administration, he’d masterminded sanctions to shut down the overseas banking deals that greased the wheels of the oligarchy. He’d also pushed the Justice Department to investigate the shady finances behind Russia’s energy sector, and the result had been multiple sealed indictments for bribery and money laundering. The Russian billionaires were bellowing at Putin to do something.

  Cafferty hated the Russian elites, and the feeling was mutual. But to Bourne, that didn’t explain the monumental risk of going after a personal friend and adviser to the U.S. president. No one in Moscow would take a step like that if Cafferty hadn’t crossed some kind of dangerous line.

  Bourne was missing something. He was being kept in the dark.

  Why?

  He went over Cafferty’s itinerary line by line, looking at it from the perspective of an assassin. The man was booked solid for two days straight, one meeting after another. Most were small gatherings that would be hard to ambush. Two people, maybe three. Finance ministers. Energy secretaries. CEOs. The transport to and from the venues would be heavily guarded. The only location in which Cafferty would be publicly exposed was his Monday speech. There would be hundreds of strangers there. Any one of them could be Lennon, hidden behind the perfect disguise and the perfect credentials. Bourne didn’t understand why Cafferty was willing to take the risk, just for a speech that anyone in the finance sector could give. All it would take for Lennon to strike was a brief meeting, passing Cafferty, shaking his hand, bumping into him. In a second or two, he could deliver a fatal dose of Novichok right under the noses of the security guards.

  Again, Bourne’s instincts told him he was only getting half the story.

  He decided it was time for Thomas Gillette to check out the venue in person. He dressed in a business suit, with a 1950s fedora and old-fashioned sunglasses that looked like the uniform of Foggy Bottom, and he left the hotel into the hot, humid afternoon outside. On the street, he hailed one of London’s black cabs and asked to go to the Naval College.

  “Gonna take a while,” the cabbie told him from the front seat. “Most of the streets are blocked. I’ll need to take you around the back.”

  “I’m in no hurry,” Bourne replied.

  He watched through the cab’s windows as the driver took them through a tunnel under the Thames and then expertly navigated a series of empty side streets to avoid the crowds of protesters filling the riverside in Greenwich. They arrived at a parking lot on the southeast side of the sprawling museum, where armed security checked Bourne’s credentials before letting him inside. As he neared the Baroque buildings, he went through a metal detector. The Brits were taking no chances. There would be no guns, no knives, and no bombs inside. But the danger to Cafferty wasn’t an assault on the facility itself, but one lone assassin operating undercover.

  That was Lennon.

  Bourne made his way to the Painted Hall, where one of the dozens of WTO meetings was already underway. A murmur of voices rumbled under the domed ceiling one hundred and fifty feet over his head. He climbed the steps from the vestibule into the long, narrow hall, which was like entering the Sistine Chapel. A vast eighteenth-century mural filled the ceiling, and chambered windows and Corinthian columns lined the walls on both sides. Most of the chairs that had been set up in the hall were filled, and dozens of other people lingered in hushed conversations near the windows. A riser had been set up in the west end, where a Brazilian minister spoke to the audience on agricultural trade reform.

  Jason made his way toward the upper hall and climbed the next handful of steps past the stage. On this end, behind the riser, he saw only one bored security guard. There was a single entrance in and out of the hall here. If Holly Schultz was smart—and she was—she’d have Cafferty come and go through that door, minimizing his interaction with the rest of the crowd. But Cafferty was also an extrovert who needed to make friends with everyone in the room, and Bourne worried that the man wouldn’t leave the hall after the speech without shaking every hand.

  On the stage behind him, the panel discussion came to a close with a polite round of applause. The crowd stood up and gathered in pockets around the hall. Bourne used the opportunity to take pictures of every angle in the space and to zoom in and photograph as many of the people in attendance as he could. If this was where Lennon chose to go after Cafferty, then he’d likely have someone at every meeting to report back on security and any changes to the setup that might affect the event on Monday.

  He was still in the upper hall when he saw her.

  She was back.

  The young woman he’d spotted at Châtelet, and then again in Stockholm, stood near the four tall columns that framed the vestibule. Her appearance was completely different from the other two times he’d seen her. She wore a black wig with bangs, owlish red glasses, and a conservative gray suit. She looked like a minor government bureaucrat taking notes for her boss, but the line of her chin and the distinctive shape of her nose were unmistakable. It was her.

  She looked right at Bourne, and their eyes met. Her mouth tightened with fury at her own mistake. She knew he’d recognized her.

  Immediately, the woman hurried out of the building. Bourne pushed through the crowd down the length of the long hall, but by the time he made his way out of the vestibule, she’d already disappeared. He ran into a vast courtyard that faced the old Greenwich Hospital. Dozens of WTO delegates were spread out on the green lawn, chatting and smoking cigarettes near the white stone columns of the two buildings.

  Where was she?

  Bourne didn’t see her in the courtyard. He headed toward the river, and when he glanced down a wide corridor between the buildings, he saw her walking fast, almost running, toward the streets of Greenwich. She already had a big head start. He took long strides to close the gap, and when the woman glanced back, their eyes met again. She grabbed her phone and made a call without slowing down.

  He knew what that call was about. Cain’s here. He found me.

  The woman reached the west end of the Naval College grounds, which were gated off to keep the protesters at a distance. As she crossed to the other side of the barricade, the crowd swallowed her up. Less than a minute later, Bourne got there, too, and he exited the museum grounds into the boiling, deafening chaos on the street. Young people in black swarmed shoulder to shoulder and pushed at the fence. They chanted, sung, shouted, and screamed. Smoke bombs lingered in the air, making a gray cloud. Firecrackers popped, and sparklers cast up streaks of flame. Cars, buses, and taxis were trapped where they were, surrounded by the protesters.

  Find her!

  Bourne was certain that the woman from Châtelet was a link to Lennon.

  However, as he inched toward the river, he discovered that he was the enemy in this crowd. He took off his hat, glasses, tie, and suit coat—anything that would make him look like a WTO delegate—but none of that made any difference. Men appeared on all sides, forming a wall in front of him. He had to bump hard against their shoulders to keep moving. The men spit at him. Hurled profanities in his ear. He ignored their faces and watched their hands; the hands were always the threat. Fists. Weapons. Guns. He saw one man’s hand disappear into a pocket and come out with a knife. Bourne dodged, took hold of the man’s wrist, and twisted until he heard the snap of bone.

  A shriek of pain rose inside the crowd, but the shouts drowned it out.

  He had to get away. He co
uldn’t lose her. Each second gave her time to disappear down the Greenwich alleys.

  Bourne looked over the heads of the men surrounding him. There! She was still in the black wig, still in the gray suit. She’d almost reached the water. She clicked down the sidewalk on high heels through the shadows cast by the masts of the clipper ship museum Cutty Sark. The crowd was thin there. Again she looked back, and when she spotted him, she kicked off her shoes and ran.

  She was getting away, but Bourne was stranded where he was. The crowd trapped him in the middle of the street. He checked hands again—empty, empty, empty—but then he saw what he wanted. One of the men wore an Evil Scarecrow concert T-shirt, and where it hung over his belt, Bourne recognized the bulge of a gun. In one fluid motion, Jason jabbed two fingers in the man’s eyes, then peeled the gun from under his shirt and fired multiple times into the air. The gunfire triggered panic; around him, everyone scattered. A path opened up on the sidewalk, and he sprinted after the woman, leaving the riot behind him.

  He cleared the bow of the Cutty Sark and stopped near the river. At first, he thought he’d lost her, but then he saw a swish of her hair as she disappeared into the foot tunnel that led under the Thames.

  Bourne ran to the brick structure marking the tunnel entrance. He took the curving staircase to the bottom of the shaft. Ahead of him, a long walkway led toward the north bank of the river and the Isle of Dogs. Some of the lights were out, causing intermittent stretches of darkness. The walls were rounded like a pipe and finished in smooth white brick. At the far end of his sight, he could barely see her, arms and legs pumping, getting smaller as she disappeared into the narrowing shadows.

  He took off after her. The tunnel was crowded with people coming and going between the two sides of the river. He struggled to keep her in sight as she passed in and out of the dark passages where lights had been broken. His footsteps rang out loud and fast in the tight confines of the tunnel, and each time he spotted her again, she was closer. She couldn’t outrun him.

  A few more seconds.

  He nearly had her!

  Then Bourne passed into the darkness of a long stretch of broken lights. He focused on the woman ahead of him, but missed the two men waiting in the shadows of the tunnel wall. One of the men swung a length of pipe that jolted his calf with a shiver of pain. He crashed to the ground, and the two men landed on him in an instant, pummeling his body with blows.

  One aimed the pipe at his head. Jason raised his arm and took the blow in his wrist, leaving it numb. The other man leveled a kick that felt like a knife sinking into his kidneys. Bourne absorbed several more blows, but when the next kick landed against his side, he grabbed the man’s ankle and shunted it sideways. Off balance, the man stumbled and fell.

  The other man swung the pipe at Bourne’s head again. Jason rolled, then sent the toe of his shoe streaking into the man’s groin. As the man screeched, Bourne scrambled to his feet, feeling the blows he’d taken burn like fire in his muscles. His fingers clamped around the man’s chin, driving his head backward against the stone wall with a sickening crack. The man collapsed, unconscious, and the pipe clanged to the tunnel floor.

  But the second man was on his feet again.

  He didn’t charge Bourne. Instead, he backed away slowly, his chest swelling with loud, heavy breaths. The man reached behind his back, and Bourne found himself staring through the darkness at the barrel of a gun.

  “Cain,” the man said.

  Jason felt a horrible wave of déjà vu. Tallinn.

  He’d stared down the barrel of a gun then, too. That was the first time he’d come face-to-face with an agent working for Lennon. The man even looked the same, young, with a ponytail, acne, and an arrogant, victorious smile.

  The noise of a gunshot ricocheted like a bomb in the tunnel. Bourne’s body jerked, because he was sure he’d been shot, but then he watched the man in front of him pitch forward face-first to the stone floor.

  It was Tallinn all over again.

  Behind the man’s body was a woman with a gun. Bourne stared at her and had trouble staying on his feet. This wasn’t just déjà vu. This was real, but it couldn’t be real, because the woman in front of him was dead.

  “Do I have to rescue you every time, Cain?” she said, holstering her gun.

  It was Nova.

  6

  Nova! She was alive!

  It was impossible. And yet it was her.

  They sat beside each other near the Thames at the base of a high wall on the Isle of Dogs. The tide was low, but the moss-covered stone at their backs was damp. Since they’d escaped from the Greenwich tunnel, they hadn’t said a word. He’d asked no questions, and she’d offered no explanations. The woman from the Painted Hall, who’d been following him since Châtelet, was long gone. Not far away, they could hear the sirens of police cars responding to a death under the river.

  Jason stared at Nova, still unable to accept what his eyes were showing him. She was exactly the same. Still the long, luscious black hair that he could remember his hands exploring. The intense green eyes, the dimple in her chin. She’d added new tattoos in three years; he could see them on her bare arms. She wore a sleeveless white top over a black sports bra and drainpipe jeans that were like a second skin over her taut, trim legs. Her mother’s necklace—the Greek coin pendant—still hung on her chest. Seeing her alive made him distrust his brain all over again. He felt a crazy panic that the two years since he watched her die had all been a dream. The only way he knew it wasn’t was when she brushed her hair aside and he saw the scar of a bullet wound in the swell of her right breast.

  “I watched Treadstone carry you away from the shooting in Las Vegas,” Jason said. “I was sure you were dead.”

  Nova turned her head to stare back at him. Memories exploded in his brain like fireworks. With so much of his past extinguished, the things he did remember were even more intense. In an instant, he watched the images of their relationship pass before his eyes. The first time they’d met, in a street café in Prague. Their first mission together on the Greek coast, near where she’d been born in Corinth. The first time they’d made love, in a chalet near the seaway in Quebec.

  “I did die,” Nova replied. “I died on the operating table. They brought me back.”

  “I can’t believe Nash didn’t tell me. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  Nova reached out to touch his face, but then she drew back her hand. It was her acknowledgment that things were no longer the same between them. “Treadstone thought you’d turned. Nash was convinced you’d ordered the hit on me yourself.”

  “There’s no way you believed that,” Jason said.

  “I didn’t know what to believe. They told me all the evidence pointed at you. Even if I didn’t think it was true, what could I do? How could I ever trust you again if there was even a glimmer of doubt? You would have felt the same way.”

  She was right.

  Rule number two. Trust no one. Treadstone.

  “What happened next?” he asked.

  “I spent six months getting stronger. Putting my body back together. By the time I was ready to work again, you’d already quit. You’d left the agency.”

  “I quit because I thought Treadstone had you killed.”

  “I know. I found that out later. I read about what happened last year with Medusa.”

  “You could have found me then.”

  “I didn’t even know if you were still alive,” Nova said. “The rumor in the intelligence world was that you’d died. And honestly, by then, my life was completely different. I’d left Treadstone, too. I was done with that whole world. Which meant I needed to be done with you, too. I’m sorry.”

  Jason shook his head. “You’re lying.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Six months ago. In Paris. I came back to my apartment, and I was sure I smelled you
r perfume. I thought I was going crazy. But I wasn’t, was I?”

  She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Okay. Yes, you’re right. I wanted to see you. There was still a part of me that couldn’t give you up. I knew you’d go to Paris. That was always your home base. So I went to look for you there. I tracked down where you were staying. I went to your flat, and I waited for you to come back.”

  “Why?”

  Nova opened her eyes again with a flash of anger. Whenever that happened, he could see the Greek half of her blood. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jason. Why do you think? Don’t you realize how I felt about you?”

  He didn’t answer. All of his instincts told him to push her away.

  Don’t you understand? I’m toxic! Don’t come back into my life!

  “You left before I got back,” he said.

  “I couldn’t stay. The longer I waited for you, the more I realized that I couldn’t dredge up the past. Not for either of us. I had to go forward with my life, not backward, and so did you. It was easier to let you think I was gone.”

  Bourne tried to turn off his feelings and push them away. He couldn’t allow himself to think about what his life had been like with Nova. The way she’d made him come alive after years of feeling empty and dead. He told himself that he’d moved on, but the truth was that he’d never stopped loving her. Seeing her in front of him, alive, brought that pent-up emotion back like a tidal wave.

  He knew this woman better than anyone in his life. Better than Abbey Laurent. Even better than Marie. She’d been born in privilege, her mother a Greek fashion model, her father a top British oil executive. Their family was just the three of them; she had no siblings. She’d had a fairy-tale life as a little girl, but her childhood had ended in violence when she was only seven years old. Their family yacht had been hijacked by pirates off the coast of Crete, her parents executed along with the crew, their throats slit, all to steal a few thousand dollars in cash and jewelry. Nova, hiding under a bed as the blood of her parents soaked across the deck into her clothes, had been the only survivor. Shell-shocked and traumatized, she didn’t speak a word for six months.