Bourne was done with the game. “What do you want, Lennon?”
“The same thing you want. Tati Reznikova. I guess we’ll see who finds her first.”
“I guess we will.”
“Of course, I know Tati, and you don’t. She’s very smart. Not like her husband. She’s going to be extremely difficult to outfox.”
“The difference is, we just want to protect her.”
Lennon’s voice took on a cynical edge. “Protect her? Really? Is that why you’re after her? Is that what you tell yourself? Yes, the motives of Holly Schultz and the CIA are always so noble and pure. They would never sacrifice innocent lives, would they?”
Bourne said nothing, but the name hung in the air between them, unspoken.
Kotov.
“Why call me?” Jason asked. “Did you think I’d tell you anything?”
“Actually, you already answered my most important question.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t have Tati, either. Not yet. I thought it was possible, just possible, that she might have convinced Vadik to turn himself in. Better the Brits and the Americans than the FSB for him. Although really, it doesn’t matter. One way or another, he’s dead.”
Bourne cursed silently. He was tired, he’d been played, and he’d made a mistake.
“However, since you gave me something I wanted, I’ll give you something in return,” Lennon went on. “Information.”
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“Well, it’s up to you.”
Bourne frowned, but he couldn’t say no. “What’s the information?”
“There’s a drab little warehouse off Wallingford Road in Uxbridge. It’s worth paying a visit. Honestly, it’s a useful location, so I hate to leave it behind. No windows, excellent soundproofing. But you know my rule, never use the same place twice.”
“What’s in the warehouse?” Bourne asked.
There was silence on the other end. Even the echoing noises of the city disappeared from his phone.
“Lennon?”
Jason looked across the river. He was alone again.
The man in the shadows was gone.
25
Bourne and Nova made it to Uxbridge before dawn. They came by themselves, without anyone from MI-5, because Holly didn’t want the Brits seeing the warehouse until she knew what was inside.
It was too early for most of the workers to arrive, so the road through the industrial estate was empty. Warehouses lined both sides of the street. They parked near a gray fence on the road’s north end and got out and walked. In the darkness, they could barely see each other. Nova’s dark hair and dark clothes blended into the night. Jason kept space between them as if he were social distancing.
Nova noticed.
“I think Lennon got under your skin,” she said.
“He didn’t,” Jason replied.
“Then what’s going on with you?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Really? When did we become strangers?”
He didn’t answer. Nova dropped the conversation, so they continued in silence.
Two blocks down, they reached a windowless building lined with gray steel. There were two loading dock doors and a small white door off the street, but otherwise, the warehouse had no identifying signs. A panel van was parked outside. Jason checked the windows of the truck but didn’t see anything except two boxes on the passenger seat labeled as replacement HVAC capacitors.
“Do we have any idea what we’re looking for?” Nova asked.
“No. But Lennon wants us to find it. We’ll know.”
He tested the warehouse door. It was locked. He heard an industrial hum from inside, but that was all. He didn’t think this was the place.
“Let’s keep going. Come on, it’s going to be light soon. We need to find the warehouse before the morning shifts begin.”
They kept walking south, a few feet apart from each other. Most of the buildings they passed didn’t match Lennon’s description, so he skipped them. When they came upon a second windowless warehouse on the other side of a metal fence, Bourne climbed it and levered the building door open with a heavy shove of his shoulder. Inside, switching on a flashlight, he saw walls lined with milling equipment.
Another dead end.
He went back to the street, where Nova was waiting for him. He could see her more clearly now as the sky lightened. The thin, small shape of her body. The ebony hair. There was an intense, angry look in her green eyes.
“You need to tell me what’s going on,” she insisted.
“What are you talking about?”
“The ice you’re giving me. What did Lennon say?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just focus on the job, Nova. We’re running out of time.”
He turned away, but she grabbed his wrist.
“Is it Anthony?” she asked. “Is that what’s pissing you off? It’s not personal between him and me.”
“Really? Are you sleeping with him?”
Nova’s face smoldered with resentment. “Yes. So what?”
“Sounds personal to me.”
“No, it’s physical. That’s all it is. Maybe it’s more to him, but it’s not to me.”
“You brought it up. I didn’t.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Jason. I really don’t.”
“I don’t want anything. I’ve made that pretty clear from the beginning.”
“Did you sleep with Abbey Laurent?” she asked.
“What difference does that make?”
“You asked me, so I’m asking you.”
Jason’s mind went back to a night in a hot motel room outside Amarillo. He remembered the sound of Abbey taking off her clothes and the feel of her bare skin when she climbed into bed with him. “Yes, I did.”
“Of course you did. Don’t think I’m blind.”
Jason didn’t want to have this conversation with her, not here, not ever, but there was no way to escape it. “You’re jealous of my relationship with Abbey?”
“You’re fucking right I am.”
“I haven’t seen her in more than a year. I already told you that.”
“Yeah, and I haven’t seen you in two years,” Nova told him. “But that hasn’t changed anything for me.”
He shook his head. “This has nothing to do with the feelings we had for each other.”
He put it in the past tense deliberately, and she heard him.
“Then what is it?”
Jason came up close to her. He was so close that all he wanted to do was kiss her. “Paris. This is about Paris.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lennon knows about Paris. Where I live. Where I go. He was there. He followed me.”
“I don’t—” Nova began, but then she stopped. “You think I told him how to find you?”
“Did you?”
Her cheeks flushed red, and her nostrils flared. In a blur of motion, she slapped him hard across the face. “Fuck off, Jason. You don’t believe that. Not for one second. You’re just looking for any excuse to send me away. To be alone again. It scares the hell out of you to have me back in your life, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s go,” Jason said coldly, because he didn’t want to admit that she was right.
His face stung. He continued down the street, and it was a long time before he heard Nova’s footsteps behind him again. The road was rutted with potholes, which were damp with rainwater. In the next block, he came upon a metal fence topped with coiled concertina wire. On the other side of the fence, behind a locked gate, he could see the roof of a small storage building. There were no windows and a single loading dock door.
Nova came up next to him. She spok
e in a clipped voice. “Sorry.”
“My fault,” he said.
She didn’t argue with him. “Do you think that’s it?”
He pointed at the printed sign near the roof: imagine enterprises.
“Sounds like Lennon’s sense of humor,” he said.
“That’s a serious fence. They don’t want visitors.”
Bourne went over to a streetlight post next to the fence. From his pocket, he drew out a pair of leather gloves and put them on. Like a lumberjack, he shimmied up the pole until he was above the level of the concertina wire. Then he pushed off and dropped, landing hard inside the fence. Looking back, he saw Nova following, climbing gracefully and jumping down next to him with a light touch, as if she could fly.
He studied the interior of the industrial yard. There were other buildings nearby, as well as pickup trucks and empty semitrailers. Power lines stretched overhead, mounted on tall steel towers. Rollaway trash bins overflowed with scrap wood, wire, and metal. If anyone had seen them breaking in, they hadn’t come running.
Bourne tested the metal loading dock door on the warehouse. It was locked. He and Nova went around to the side, where they found a smaller door. This one was locked, too, but it gave easily when Bourne kicked it. Both of them drew their guns. They paused outside, because a noise told them that the building wasn’t empty. A strange scratching, like the skitter of rats on a roof, came from the darkness.
He reached inside to find a light switch on the wall, but when he flicked it up and down, the lights didn’t come on. The interior remained black. Crouching, they went inside, Bourne going right, Nova going left. He kicked the door shut behind them. They were blind now, and the scratching sound around them got louder. Something brushed against Bourne’s leg, and he reached down but his hands came away empty. They weren’t alone, but whatever was with them wasn’t human.
He switched on his flashlight. In the cone of the beam, something small and black streaked through his line of sight and disappeared. Just for an instant, he saw the gleam of red eyes, and then they were gone. He began to follow the animal, but he froze as his flashlight lit up a grotesque image in the middle of the room.
John Lennon stared back at him.
It was a caricature of Lennon, made out of hard plastic and obviously decades old, a mask with black, unseeing eyes and a mouth caught in a bizarrely inappropriate smile. The cartoon aspect of the face had a horror that made it impossible to look away.
“What the hell is that?” Nova asked.
They approached the mask. It seemed to float above the ground, disconnected from anything around it. As he got closer, the animal in the warehouse streaked past Bourne’s leg again, but whatever it was escaped when he tried to grab it. He also heard a guttural wail that sent shivers up his spine, as if it came from the mask.
He kept his light on John Lennon. As they got closer, he realized that the mask was balanced on top of a human body, which was what made it seem to float. A man sat in a chair with the mask covering his face. The body was draped in black crepe, leaving it invisible in the light. Only the mask taunted them. Bourne tugged on the crepe fabric, and it swished to the floor, revealing the man beneath it.
Jason didn’t need to remove the mask to recognize who it was. The body was Clark Cafferty. He grabbed the man’s wrist to check for a pulse, but the simple act of moving the arm caused the Lennon mask to topple backward off Cafferty’s shoulders.
There was nothing underneath it.
Cafferty’s head was gone.
“Oh, shit,” Nova hissed.
Bourne stared at the bloody stump of the man’s neck, the severed spinal cord.
At his feet, adding to the horror, the animal yowled again.
Jason turned the light to the floor and followed the wall of the warehouse to the very corner. There, its back arched, its fur pricked up, its eyes red as fire, was a black cat hissing and spitting at them.
“A cat?” Nova asked. “Why leave a cat here?”
But Jason got the message.
“Kotov is Russian for cat,” he told her. “Lennon knows Tallinn was a fake. He knows Kotov is alive. We have to warn Nash in California. Lennon has a new target now.”
26
Nash Rollins had met Grigori Kotov once before, years earlier, when the Russian had just become a part of the new Putin government. Kotov hadn’t changed much since then. A little heavier in his round face. A little less hair. A little more gray in his beard.
For a man who’d been dead for three years, he looked good.
He dressed like someone accustomed to power, in a suit that would have cost a month of Nash’s government salary. Holly and Dixon had been good to him in his isolation. He had the best vodka and wine. The best cigars. Expensive, authentic artwork on the walls, reflecting a connoisseur’s tastes. A married couple, probably both CIA, undoubtedly both armed, lived in the house to cook and clean, and they had gourmet food flown in from markets around the world. On the first night together in the California mansion, Nash had dined with Kotov on Maine lobster and washed it down with Krug champagne.
The Russian spy’s sexual needs were well satisfied, too. Every couple of weeks, a different anonymous prostitute arrived, flown in by the CIA from New York or Nassau or Hong Kong. The woman spent a few days in Kotov’s bed and then was taken away, never knowing who she’d slept with or where the rendezvous had taken place.
The house in the forest was huge for a single spy: two stories, four thousand square feet, looking out on acres of virgin redwood trees, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and a guard gate. It had a fully equipped gym, a library with hundreds of Russian and English volumes, a private movie theater, and an indoor swimming pool. The luxury living would have kept a billionaire happy, but Nash was aware that the mansion was also a prison cell, made for solitary confinement. Kotov couldn’t go anywhere. He couldn’t make phone calls without the CIA monitoring the call. He couldn’t use the internet without every keystroke being watched. It was a lonely life.
The two of them sat on the sprawling deck that overlooked the forest, but Kotov didn’t stay in the chair for long. He was an impatient man, and he kept getting up and pacing back and forth, chain-smoking cigarettes one after another. His footsteps were heavy. It was mid-morning, which meant it was nearly evening in London, and Kotov was hungry for an update.
So far, all they knew was that the plan involving Cafferty and Sorokin had failed. It was a catastrophe. And Kotov’s daughter, Tati, was missing.
Nash used his cane to limp to the railing, where thick redwoods grew close to the deck. Eucalyptus scented the air. The sky was invisible above the crowns of trees, no sun breaking through. They were near enough to the ocean that he could hear the distant thunder of waves, but he couldn’t see it. The morning air was cool and damp.
“Holly will call as soon as she has new information,” Nash told Kotov.
“She needs to call now!” he retorted. “This is ridiculous! I sit here trapped, and I don’t know whether my daughter is dead or alive.”
“Yes, I understand.”
Kotov thumped a fist against the railing. “You have children, Rollins?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t understand,” Kotov snapped.
The Russian was right about that. Nash had never had a wife or a child or anyone he’d been in love with. He’d never even had a dog. Those were vulnerabilities that he couldn’t afford. Nash was also an only child, and his parents had passed away years earlier. It made him the perfect agent for Treadstone. A man with no ties.
“We know Tati is with her husband,” Nash told him, “and they’re on the run. Right now, that’s all I can tell you.”
“Vadik,” Kotov snarled, practically spitting. “If I’d been there, I would never have let her marry that worthless simp. Tati always had a weakness for boys like that. She could have had an oligar
ch’s son or an Olympic gymnast, but no, it was never about money or looks for her. Talk to her about heat-trapping carbon dioxide, and she melts. I told Holly that I wanted Vadik killed. When I heard about the wedding, I said, send in Cain, make the little prick disappear. She didn’t do it. Now look where we are.”
“Well, Cain is on the ground now,” Nash pointed out. “He’ll get Tati out of there.”
“He better. I’ve already put my daughter through three years of hell. Thinking I’m dead. Having to disown me in front of Putin and the others. If anything happens to her, I can’t have that on my conscience.”
“Lennon won’t kill her even if he finds her. Not when he finds out you’re alive. I’m sorry to be so practical about it, but if he does that, he has no leverage over you.”
Kotov snorted. “There are worse things than dying. If it’s a question of Putin’s love for Tati against his hatred for me, I know how that goes. Leverage is one thing, but he’ll want revenge. I betrayed him, and you don’t get to do that and not pay the price.”
The Russian turned around and pushed angrily through the double glass doors that led into the den of the estate. A fire crackled in the huge fireplace. Despite the hour, he poured a large shot of vodka and went to the mantel, where he had multiple photographs of Tati arrayed in frames. Then he sat on the black leather sofa and leaned forward, his elbows pressing into his knees. Nash took a seat across from him in an elaborately carved wooden armchair.
“He and I were close for years,” Kotov said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I helped him build his power base. I mean, he’s still the smartest man I ever met, but you don’t rise to the top alone. You need allies. He was using me to curry favor with the oligarchs while they were gathering their wealth in the early days. He wanted their gratitude, their loyalty, so I went out and made sure deals got closed, competitors eliminated, whatever it took to consolidate their power. That’s what greased the wheels for him to take over. He and I had an understanding. Eventually, it would be my turn. But after 2012, I realized he was never going to step aside, not unless I forced him to do it. Am I ambitious? Yes, of course. I plead guilty to that, and I won’t apologize. But this is about patriotism, Rollins. I’m a Russian first, and everything else is second.”
The Bourne Treachery Page 20
