Eventually, she went to live with her uncle. He was a member of UK Parliament who was unmarried and had no interest in raising a child. The relationship didn’t go well. As she grew up, Nova spent wild years in London, out of control with rebellion. She grew addicted to drugs. She covered up her body with tattoos as symbols of her independence. She slept with dozens of strangers. She tried to kill herself several times. At twenty-three, when she awoke from the latest cocaine-fueled nightmare in a Soho gutter, she finally decided to live, rather than die.
She went to her uncle and told him she wanted to be a spy. She wanted to kill the kind of people who’d killed her parents.
As it happened, Nash Rollins was in London at the same time. He was looking to find young Brits he could train for Treadstone to infiltrate extremist movements throughout Europe. Nova became one of his first recruits, and soon she was one of his top agents. It was as if every operation proved to be a little piece of payback for a seven-year-old’s grief. But nothing changed her inner darkness. She was a dark woman to her core: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, with a cold, dark fury in the bottom of her soul.
When Bourne met her a few years later, they’d clicked immediately. The two of them were like damaged halves of one whole. She knew his story, the man with no memory and no past. The man whose identity had been stolen from a killer, in order to become a killer himself.
He still remembered what she’d said to him at that café in Prague. I envy you. I’d erase my own past if I could.
“So you left Treadstone,” Jason said.
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I came here. This is home. Then I went to Europe. I’ve been working for Interpol ever since. I’m on a special task force.”
“Doing what?” Bourne asked.
“Hunting Lennon.”
Bourne nodded. Of course. Suddenly it all made sense. That was why Nash had warned him about ghosts from his past. For the intelligence community, the threat against Cafferty was also the perfect bait to draw out Lennon. That would bring Nova back to London.
“You know why I’m here?” Bourne asked.
“Cafferty.” She studied his face and added, “You don’t look happy about it.”
“The mission came from Holly Schultz.”
“Tallinn,” Nova remembered with a frown. “Do you still think Dixon Lewis leaked the escape route to Lennon?”
“Well, it wasn’t Sugar.”
Nova smiled. Christ, that smile! It always stabbed him in the heart.
“You may not trust Dixon, but I don’t see what he would have gained by betraying Kotov on his own mission.”
“I don’t, either,” Bourne admitted, “but I’m working for them again, and something already smells wrong about this operation. They’re keeping things from me. We need to be careful.”
Nova took a long time to reply, and then she spoke softly. “We?”
“Sorry. Force of habit.”
She said nothing. Instead, she stared off at the Thames with a faraway look that he knew well. The wind blew her hair across her face, and he felt an impulse to reach over and set it right. But he didn’t.
“I’m pretty sure the woman in the tunnel was a Lennon operative,” Bourne went on. “I’ve seen her before. She followed me through Paris and Stockholm.”
Nova nodded. “According to one of the people we interrogated, her code name is Yoko.”
“You’re kidding,” Jason said.
“I’m serious. You know what Gunnar says. Lennon is having fun with all of this. But the fact that he calls her Yoko makes me think she’s closer to him than the others. Anyway, she’s slippery. She’s always in disguise, like him. You’re better at seeing through that than me. I didn’t even know it was her today until I spotted you, Jason, and realized that you were following someone. I figured you were walking into a trap. Yoko always has backup close by. That’s why I went after you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Me, too.”
Nova leaned closer, as if she wanted him to kiss her. As if she wanted to turn back the clock. Even before they’d fallen in love, there had been raw desire between them, and he still felt the power of that attraction. Even so, he didn’t respond. Her eyes looked away with a little shame. She’d been trying to manipulate him. To arouse him. Or maybe she just wanted to see if she still could.
“You don’t trust me anymore,” she said, backing away. “That’s gone. I killed it.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I wish I could trust you.”
“But you can’t.”
Her full lips pushed into a frown. “So what do we do now?”
“We find Lennon,” Jason replied. He added, “Everything else is in the past.”
* * *
—
Yoko sat down on a bench near the Triton Fountain in Regent’s Park. Ducks swam in the green water of the circular pond. The grove was surrounded by sharply manicured hedges and a cluster of purple thistles. It was mid-evening and nearly closing time, and the shadows from the tall trees were long. All of the other benches clustered around the fountain were empty.
She’d changed her look, using makeup to add a decade to her face. She’d put on a wig of long blond hair tied in a ponytail, darkened her eyebrows, changed the color of her eyes to brown, and emphasized her cheekbones with blush. She wore the emerald green track suit of an evening jogger, and she’d run here from the Underground to make sure she was flushed and out of breath. As she sat on the bench, she unclipped a plastic bottle from her belt and squirted water into her mouth.
A man clip-clopped down the sidewalk toward the fountain. He walked with a limp, an old-age pensioner well into his sixties. His graying hair was slicked back over his head. He wore fraying slacks and a bulky sweater that looked too heavy for the warm evening, and his shoes were dusty and unshined. He wore a pair of dated binoculars around his neck. He spent a minute studying the naked bronze sculptures in the pond, with his hands folded neatly behind his back, and then he wandered over and took a seat on the other end of the bench.
The woman knew better than to look directly at him. She stared at the fountain without acknowledging her companion. They were lovers, but she still knew nothing about his real face or his real voice. When he came to her, it was always in complete darkness and total silence, other than the quick gasps and moans of sex. She’d learned to deaden all the lights in her hotel room wherever she was staying, because she never knew when he would show up in the middle of the night and climb into her bed. And when they were both sated, he disappeared again, leaving her alone.
“Hello, Yoko,” Lennon said, sounding like the old bird-watcher he was pretending to be.
She didn’t bother with small talk or preamble. “Bourne spotted me at the Painted Hall. I was lucky to get away.”
“I believe you forgot the word again.”
“What?”
“He spotted you again.”
“Yes.”
“I warned you about Cain and disguises. That’s one of his specialties. You need more than your usual efforts to fool him. That pretty little nose of yours gets you into trouble.”
“I failed. I understand that.”
“We’ll have to keep you away from him. We can’t have him recognizing you again, not in the middle of the operation. Sean’s identity is ready for the conference. I’ll use him instead. You can wait for me outside and run the getaway.”
“If you feel that’s necessary.”
“I do.”
Yoko chafed at the idea of being kept away from the heart of the mission, but she had no one to blame but herself. And once Lennon had made up his mind about something, you didn’t challenge him. She wasn’t the first Yoko. There had been others before her. Eventually, they’d all become liabilities.
“So Bourne was surv
eilling the Naval College?” Lennon continued, tapping his fingers on his knees. “Did he deviate at all from the locations on Cafferty’s schedule?”
“No. I tracked him directly to the Painted Hall. The speech there is the obvious security risk, but it will be difficult to get close to Cafferty if Bourne is around. Perhaps you should think about an alternate approach.”
“I’m not worried about him.”
“Of course not.”
“And you saw no indication that he knows about Sorokin?”
“No.”
“Interesting. Holly Schultz and Dixon Lewis are playing it cool about the meeting. All right. Now tell me about the debacle in the tunnel.”
“I called for backup as I escaped. They ambushed Bourne, but it didn’t go well. One of our agents was killed. Fortunately, the other got away before the police arrived. I took his report and then eliminated him.”
“How did Bourne escape?”
Yoko had to restrain herself from turning her head. “Nova showed up. She killed our other man.”
“Nova,” Lennon mused, drawing out the name with fascination. “Of course. So Nova and Bourne are together again?”
“Yes.”
Lennon was silent for a while. He lifted his binoculars in the dim shadows and focused on a bird in one of the tall trees. “Well. That was bound to happen sooner or later. Perhaps we can turn this to our advantage. If Cain has one weakness, it’s her.”
7
“How’s the weather in London?” Clark Cafferty asked, as his limousine cruised along the I-66 out of Arlington toward Dulles Airport. He dropped a couple of ice cubes from a silver bucket into his vodka.
“Hot,” Holly Schultz replied. “That’s pretty much the scene on the ground, too.”
“Yes, I’ve been watching the riots on the news.”
Cafferty clinked the ice in his drink and let it melt. He studied the video screen built into the back of the limousine seat and could see Holly at the desk in her Radisson Blu suite, with her yellow lab, Sugar, sitting at rapt attention beside her.
Most of the time, Cafferty didn’t like intelligence agents. They tended to be bureaucrats at heart, more focused on covering their asses than taking risks. But Holly was different. It was hard enough being a woman in the CIA, but being blind on top of it was an almost unsurmountable challenge. And yet she’d proven herself more ruthless than any of the men Cafferty dealt with, and he liked that. If you wanted the right ends, you couldn’t trouble yourself about the means.
“Have you received any further messages from our friend?” she asked.
“Nothing but radio silence,” Cafferty replied. “I assume that’s a good thing. If he’s not talking, then everything’s a go. The only thing we’d be likely to hear at this point is that he was pulling out of the meeting.”
“His plane is scheduled at Farnborough around midnight tomorrow. Dixon will meet him.”
“Staying where?”
“We don’t know yet. He’s being cautious.”
“Well, he has reason to be,” Cafferty replied. He called to Dixon Lewis, who was in the hotel room behind Holly, pacing back and forth and murmuring into his own phone through a headset.
“Dixon, is everything set for Monday?”
The other agent approached the tablet on Holly’s desk. “Sir, yes, we have the details in place. As of right now, you, Holly, and I are the only ones who know the actual plan. We’ll keep it that way until the last possible moment.”
“This needs to work,” Cafferty commented. “I don’t have to remind you that we’ve put three years into this operation.”
“It will work,” Dixon replied confidently.
“What about security?”
“We’re monitoring threats online. There’s a lot of chatter from the Gaia Crusade. And of course, we assume Lennon is active. But the plan takes all of that into account.”
“And Cain?”
“He’s in London,” Holly replied. “I supplied him with a cover and the details of your WTO schedule. His credentials triggered at the Naval College this afternoon. He’s scoping out the Painted Hall in anticipation of your speech.”
Cafferty pursed his lips in thought. “Lennon has tangled with Cain before. He’ll expect him to be involved.”
“Yes, actually, we’re counting on that,” Holly said.
“Does Cain suspect anything?”
“I’m sure he does,” Holly replied with a shrug of her shoulders. “He doesn’t trust anyone, least of all me and Dixon. But as of now, he’s following the mission plan. So is Nash Rollins. He’s on his way to California to look after the situation there while we’re away.”
Cafferty was pleased, but his satisfaction didn’t reduce his stress. After years of laying groundwork behind the scenes, the pieces were falling into place. This was also the most dangerous time, when a single mistake could ruin everything. So far, the plan appeared to be proceeding as Holly and Dixon had predicted. The two of them were smart, but smart people could also be their own worst enemy. They never believed that anyone else could outfox them, and if there was one thing Cafferty had learned about the assassin known as Lennon, the man was a fox.
The video screen in the seat showed Cafferty a picture of his own face, in addition to Holly and Dixon. He shook his head when he glanced at it. When he was talking to younger people, he forgot that he was an old man. He was in his sixties, with his hairline creeping higher on his forehead each year. His stringy brown hair would be mostly gray if he didn’t vainly color it. His skin was gathering the barnacles of age, dotted with liver spots that his doctor burned off from time to time. But more always came back. His dark eyes looked sunken on his face because of the deep bags below them.
He still thought of himself as an upstart taking on the system, but in fact, he was the system now. The Beltway insider. He wore an expensive suit and an expensive tie, but having money was simply the by-product of being successful at what he did. His wealth also meant that he could focus on his legacy, and he was determined that his legacy would include new leadership in Moscow. He might not be young anymore, but he hadn’t given up on revolutions. After decades keeping Russia under his thumb, Putin had to go.
“What’s your take on Sorokin?” Holly asked. “Will he join us? And if he does, can he get the others on board, too?”
Cafferty allowed himself a smile. “My career has been built on persuading powerful people to do things they don’t want to do. The fact is, Gennady took the meeting. He’d never have done that if he didn’t think we had something interesting to offer him.”
“It means the sanctions are working.”
“Exactly. So are the climate uprisings in Moscow. Two can play the game of disrupting the enemy’s social order. The Russians have had the playing field to themselves for four years, and now we’re finally fighting back. This moment is critical, Holly. The two of you need to make sure that nothing goes wrong. If the plan comes apart now, an opportunity like this may not come again for an entire generation.”
“Understood.”
“One last thing,” Cafferty added. “The other piece of the puzzle. Is that being dealt with?”
Holly nodded. “We pulled strings with our Russian science contacts to extend an invitation for the climate meetings at the WTO. As far we can tell, her trip hasn’t raised any red flags with the FSB.”
“Is she there?” Cafferty asked. “Did she arrive safely?”
“Yes. Tati Reznikova is in London. She got to the city with her husband two days ago. Now that she’s here, we’re keeping her in sight twenty-four seven. However, I think it would be best if you explain the situation to her yourself. It’s going to be a shock.”
Cafferty sipped his vodka. “I agree. Make sure she’s at the Naval College on Monday. I’ll reach out to her then. Remember, Holly, the success of our strategy depends on that wo
man. We need to get to her before Lennon does.”
* * *
—
Tati lay naked on the bed of their rental flat in Mayfair.
She knew Vadik would want sex whenever he got back. Every night, he needed to put his little missile between her legs. He wasn’t very good in bed, but at least he was quick, which meant he was typically asleep a few minutes later and she could go back to her books. Sex wasn’t important to her, not compared to her work. She’d had a few lovers over the years, but she could remember no one who’d taken her breath away. The others were all like Vadik, too busy worshipping her body to know what to do with it.
Tonight, as she waited for him to return, she studied the latest core temperatures that her colleagues at Vostok had sent from Antarctica. She missed her time at Vostok. The other scientists had warned her that six months in isolation would be difficult to endure, but Tati had enjoyed her stay on the remote continent. She had little in the way of social or physical needs, so the unglamorous life was fine. The men had hit on her, young and old, married and single. There was only one other woman at the station, and she’d hit on her, too. Tati had said no to all of them, and that was that. The rest of the time, while the others went stir-crazy, she savored the bitter cold and the extreme environment. It was a severe, beautiful place, with nothing to do but work, but for her, Vostok was a dream assignment. She would have stayed longer if the government hadn’t insisted on her coming home.
With her head on the pillow, Tati glanced around the luxurious apartment. It had a large flat screen, silk sheets, and expensive soaps and body lotions stocked in the bathroom. Most of the other Russian delegates were sleeping three to a room in cheap hotels an hour’s train ride from the city center, but growing up among the elite had given Tati certain advantages. Of course, she assumed the flat was bugged. Some FSB agent in the embassy probably snickered whenever she farted. No doubt there were video cameras, too, so they could zoom in on her boobs and watch Vadik wildly grunting and pumping on top of her. Someone was always watching. If you were smart, or important, or had money, they watched even harder, hoping to catch you doing something you shouldn’t do.
The Bourne Treachery Page 7
