The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  “He didn’t leave that meeting alive,” Jason concluded. “He was killed at the pub. If Lennon did it, that means he was there, too.”

  “Well, we’ve got dozens of men on the street in that time frame.”

  They ran the footage again, examining every man who came and went near the pub, but there were too many people, faces, corners, and intersections. Any of the men could have been members of the Gaia Crusade, and any of them could have been Lennon. None of them resembled pictures they’d seen in the WTO delegate files.

  Jason knew this was getting them nowhere, but his mind wouldn’t let him stop.

  He’d seen something.

  A single detail from one video angle poked at his brain. It had come and gone so quickly that he didn’t even realize he’d seen it until it was gone. Even so, he went back, because he needed to find it again. He kept playing and rewinding a twenty-minute stretch of time near eleven o’clock, from a camera that showed the busy street across from Russell Square Park. He’d already watched it a dozen times, but he ran it again. And again. And then again. He still didn’t see whatever it was that had made him stop. His brain knew what it was, but his eyes didn’t.

  I see you! Where are you?

  The street in the video was a sea of buses and taxis. It was hard to pick out a single pedestrian’s face among the dozens of people filling the Friday night sidewalks.

  And yet something had stirred a memory.

  “Jason? What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He played it again, and this time he froze the screen. “That man. Look at that. There’s a man in a burgundy shirt. Do you see him?”

  Nova shook her head. “I don’t.”

  Jason backed up the feed and played it again. “He’s only visible for a couple of seconds, but you can see him walking with a group—he’s pretending to be with a group—and then just as a bus blocks the view, he splits away from them. Then he’s gone.”

  “I can’t make out his face,” Nova said.

  “I can’t, either. He’s looking away. That’s deliberate. He knows where the camera is.”

  “Can you pick him up on another camera?”

  “No. This is the only angle we have. Just that one shot. If he was somewhere else, I’d have seen him.”

  “Then what are we doing, Jason? Who is he?”

  “Lennon.”

  Nova was silent for a while, holding her tongue. Finally, she shook her head. “I know we’re both desperate to find him, but how can you possibly know that? This view doesn’t show any details. It could be anybody.”

  “It’s him,” Bourne insisted.

  “How can you be sure? Do you recognize him?”

  Jason closed his eyes and listened to what his brain was telling him. He felt it rather than remembered. Gunfire. Death.

  “It’s not his face. I mean, somewhere I’ve seen that man’s face, but I can’t place it in my head. I can’t tell you what he looks like. No, it’s the walk. There’s something about his walk. He’s got this rigid grace in how he moves his shoulders, like he’s gliding. Or floating. I’ve seen that walk before. I’ve seen him before.”

  “In Tallinn?”

  “No. Farther back.”

  “How far?”

  Bourne shook his head. “That’s the thing. He’s part of the fog. It’s from the time in my head when everything’s gone. The time that’s been erased.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember any of that,” Nova said.

  “I don’t.”

  “But you know him?”

  “Somehow I do.” Jason got up from the desk and paced in the hotel room. “Why me?” he said abruptly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nash said Holly asked for me specifically. She wanted me to be the one looking for Lennon. She said it was because of Tallinn, but that doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t see him in Tallinn. So what advantage do I have over anyone else?”

  “You think Holly knows something about you and Lennon?” Nova asked. “Something that even Nash doesn’t know?”

  Bourne nodded. “I think she does. She knows that Lennon is a part of my past.”

  12

  Gennady Sorokin threw back a shot of Stoli Himalayan that was chilled to a perfect thirty-two degrees. He stood by the window in his suite at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge and looked out at the nighttime lights of the city of London.

  Sorokin loved London. It was his favorite city in the world. You could waste more money at the shops in New York, but the Americans had no sense of civilized elegance the way the Brits did. For years, he’d flown here every month, partly to do deals in the financial capital of the world, but mostly to enjoy high tea in the Palm Court or watch opera from his private box at the Coliseum, or simply to shop anonymously in the dusty old antiquarian bookshops in Charing Cross.

  It infuriated him that he was now cut off from the pleasures of London. And Paris. Milan. Manhattan. Tokyo. All the cities that made life worth living with their elite amenities. He was a virtual prisoner in Russia, thanks to the Americans and their sanctions and indictments. Step foot off his private jet at the wrong airport, and the police would be waiting for him.

  All because of Clark Cafferty.

  Cafferty didn’t understand how the game was supposed to be played. Sanctions were for show! Slap them on a few minor assets, hold a press conference, talk tough for the voters in the swing states, and meanwhile the money kept flowing through a hundred other banks with a thousand other loopholes. And indictments? Money laundering? Funding terrorism? Those were supposed to be announced in banner headlines and then dropped a few months later with a quiet filing in federal court.

  Instead, Cafferty had unleashed wolves with actual teeth. He’d choked off the funding streams for pipelines and gas plants and isolated the oligarchs in their dachas, with nothing more than Russian food, Russian art, and Russian prostitutes to pass away the days.

  And now he wanted to talk.

  Now he wanted a deal.

  Sorokin turned away from the window. He handed his empty glass to his lead security guard, Nicholai, who refilled it at the wet bar. The two of them were the only ones in the suite.

  “So what do you think?” Sorokin asked, not expecting the guard to offer an opinion. He was mostly talking to himself. “What does Cafferty plan to offer us? And what does he want in return?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Nicholai replied politely.

  “The CIA are playing it close to the vest. I asked Dixon Lewis whether the president had greenlighted the mission, but he wouldn’t answer. Which tells me he did, but the president doesn’t want his fingerprints anywhere near this in case it all blows up in their faces. That’s not a comforting thought.”

  “No, sir.”

  Sorokin sat down in the white sofa that faced the fireplace. He drank another shot, which was cold and strong. He was tall and pencil thin, with thick, curly black hair and sideburns that almost reached the bottom of his face. He had a long, jutting chin and an equally long nose, and his skin had the paleness of gloomy winter days. At age forty, he was one of the youngest of the Russian billionaires, having taken over his father’s Siberian oil and gas empire eight years earlier after the old man died of a stroke.

  Since then, Sorokin had played the required political games. He paid tribute to Putin and supported his endless grip on power. For now, that was all he could do. As long as the siloviki supported the leader known as the Moth, the other oligarchs would salute in public, in order to make sure the river of money kept flowing. But Sorokin belonged to a new, restless generation that had no loyalty to the past. He was a risk-taker. He loved the casinos in Macau and never hesitated to double down when he sensed that luck was going his way. The recent years had shown him that Russia needed to change, but that was never going to happen with the same man pulli
ng the strings. The country was ready for new blood.

  However, saying anything like that out loud was a sure way to end up at the bottom of Lake Baikal.

  “The president knows we want the sanctions and indictments removed,” Sorokin went on. “But you know the price tag is going to be high. And dangerous. Cafferty obviously thinks he has something that would make it worth the risk, but I don’t know what it could be.”

  Sorokin reached inside his suit pocket and withdrew a gold cigarette case. Nicholai bent over to light his Dunhill, and Sorokin blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling of the suite. He stared up at his beefy guard, who’d been a fixture in his life since he inherited him from his father. The man had a square face and just a fuzz of black hair, and his eyes were so narrow they looked like slits cut in a piece of paper.

  Nicholai had been loyal to him, just as he’d been loyal to his father. The only time the man had strayed had been three years earlier, when Nicholai made noises about immigrating to Belarus to work for his brother in a manufacturing venture. Sorokin had been publicly supportive while quietly he was furious at the idea of his lead guard quitting his employment. Fortunately, not long after that, the brother’s key metals supplier mysteriously shifted their business elsewhere, and the start-up went bankrupt.

  “Do you think Putin knows we’re here?” Nicholai asked.

  “Of course he does. I told him.”

  “You told him?” the guard said, not hiding his surprise.

  “Well, I told Oleg, which is as good as telling him myself. You think I’d take the chance of him finding out I slipped away from Russia to meet Clark Cafferty in secret? My plane would blow up over the Baltic.”

  “What does he think you’re doing?”

  Sorokin shrugged. “I’m simply here to find out what Cafferty is planning. He tells me, I tell Vladimir Vladimirovich. That was how I explained it to Oleg. The trick is to play both sides of the game. If I like what Cafferty has to say, then we consider our next steps. Whatever the man has up his sleeve, neutralizing Putin has to be part of the plan. The question is how he imagines going about it.”

  “What if the Moth suspects your real agenda?”

  “He may suspect, but he doesn’t know.” Sorokin pointed his cigarette at Nicholai. “Unless, of course, you told him. But you wouldn’t make a mistake like that, would you?”

  “No, sir.”

  Sorokin nodded. “Good.”

  He got up from the sofa and took his cigarette to the window again. He cracked it open and let the smell of London inside. Down on the street, traffic was quiet. Even the protesters had gone to bed.

  “What about security? Are you worried about any of these grubby little revolutionaries?”

  “I don’t expect problems from them,” Nicholai replied.

  Sorokin eyed the guard from the windows. “What about Lennon?”

  “From what I hear, he’s not active, sir.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Sorokin replied, blowing out a cloud of white smoke from his Dunhill. “If Lennon is here, that changes everything.”

  * * *

  —

  A few blocks away, the Gaia Crusade cell leader known as Harry pulled his Vauxhall sedan off Knightsbridge and stopped the car on an empty walkway near the Wellington Monument. He flipped on the dome light.

  “The Mandarin Oriental,” Harry said to Vadik with a snort. “Typical for a rich pig.”

  “What’s the plan?” Vadik asked.

  Harry rolled down the windows and glanced outside to make sure there were no police paying attention to the car. Then he reached over to the glove compartment and unfolded a London map.

  “Now that we know where he’s staying, we’ll have people at the hotel tomorrow morning. Whenever they’re ready to move to the WTO, we’ll have eyes on the car.”

  “But we won’t know what route they’re taking,” Vadik pointed out, keeping his voice steady. He could feel his tension rising as the moment grew closer, but he didn’t want to show it. He’d been involved in operations in Moscow where the risk was greater, but he’d never been on the front lines the way he was now. He hadn’t been the one with the gun in his hand.

  “The natural route from the hotel to the Naval College takes them across the Thames at Westminster,” Harry replied. “We don’t want that, not with so much security near Parliament, so we’ve got a call for flash mobs ready to go. As soon as Sorokin starts out, we’ll flood Westminster and Lambeth bridges with protesters, and that will force them north onto the Embankment. They’ll cross at Waterloo. Once they’re on the bridge, we’ve got eight vehicles ready to ambush them, four on the north, four coming from the south bank. We’ll seal them off and take out the security detail, and then you and I will deal with Sorokin personally. Is that clear?”

  Vadik swallowed hard. “It’s clear.”

  “I tap him in each knee, and then I shoot him in the dick. While he’s screaming, you put two in his skull.”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to be gone in ten seconds. We head to Waterloo, and we’re on the underground two minutes after he’s dead. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You hesitate, and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “I understand.”

  “Once we split up, we never see each other again, and you never heard of the Gaia Crusade.”

  “Of course.”

  “All right. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”

  Vadik opened the door of the Vauxhall and began to get out. “I’ll be ready.”

  “Praise Gaia,” Harry said.

  Vadik looked back into the car. “Praise Gaia.”

  * * *

  —

  The killer who called himself Lennon whistled as he strolled along Bayswater Road.

  He’d retrieved a backpack from a locker at Paddington, and it contained everything he needed for tomorrow’s transformation. The scientist from Norway was dead, but his body wouldn’t be discovered for days, so no one would be surprised to see him take his seat in the Painted Hall for Clark Cafferty’s speech. He would match the photograph on his passport precisely, and Norwegian was one of the languages that Lennon spoke fluently, along with English, French, German, and, of course, Russian.

  However, disguise was about much more than how you looked and how you talked. That might work for a cursory interrogation, but not the detailed questions of anyone who really knew what they were doing. That was why he kept a portfolio of two dozen alter egos, whose lives he’d stalked for years, people whose identity he could inhabit instantly whenever he needed them. Academics. Businessmen. Government employees. He’d studied and memorized their habits, families, idioms, pets, cars, allergies, drinks, sexual tastes, all the little details that made them who they were. Disguise wasn’t about pretending to be someone. It was about becoming them.

  As a child, he’d always wanted to be the world’s greatest actor. Now he’d gotten his wish.

  The London street was quiet, just a handful of overnight buses and taxis rolling past the hedges and trees of Hyde Park. Ahead of him, he noticed a white X scrawled on a postal box in chalk. That meant there was a package waiting, courtesy of a clerk at the embassy. He loved that the Russians were old school, still playing spy games as if this were the 1960s. He crossed the street and walked along the park wall. When he spotted a second chalk X, he reached into the hedge to find a black plastic bag tucked in the dirt. Inside was a Solarin smartphone.

  He took the phone to an old-fashioned red telephone box on the street for privacy. He dialed the number he’d used for years and waited through a long stretch of silence while the connection was made to a residence in Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow.

  Then he heard the unmistakable voice.

  “So?”

  “Everything’s ready,” Lennon replied.

  “Sorokin?”

/>   “He flew into Farnborough tonight. I’ve been tracking the Gaia Crusade chat room. They plan to ambush Sorokin as he heads to the Naval College tomorrow. Waterloo Bridge is ground zero.”

  “Will they succeed?”

  “Nicholai will make sure they do. He’s been waiting a long time to get revenge for his brother.”

  Lennon heard a laugh that was more like a snort. “Is there anyone you can’t manipulate?”

  “Only you.”

  “Oh, please. I’m sure your file on me is the thickest of all. Fortunately, we need each other.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “I have my eulogy already prepared. Sorokin was a Russian hero murdered by climate terrorists. Even the Americans will be unlikely to protest when we start eliminating the radicals.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Cafferty?”

  “I’ll send him your regards,” Lennon said with a smile.

  “A little lesson for the president not to fuck with me.”

  “Yes, he’ll get the message.”

  Lennon hesitated, and the man on the other end heard it. “Is something wrong?”

  “I wish we knew more about Cafferty’s plan. It’s a ballsy maneuver to reach out to Sorokin. He wouldn’t do that unless he had something that might actually persuade the oligarchs to turn against you. I’d like to know what that is.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone was dismissive.

  “Cafferty has an old man’s ego. Once he’s dead, so’s his plan, whatever the fuck it is. When the rest of our pampered billionaires see pictures of Sorokin with his brains splattered across Waterloo Bridge, they won’t dare lift a finger against me.”

  “Possibly,” Lennon said, not hiding his doubts. He was one of the few men on the planet who could take that tone with the man on the phone.

  “You have something else you want to say?”

  “Only that Cafferty has done considerable damage to us in a short period of time. The billionaires are scared of him. I suspect that his hand is behind the riots in Moscow, too. The resistance is too well organized and too well funded for the Americans not to be involved. I’d like to know their end game.”