The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  Jason took Tati’s arm. He dragged her toward a swell in the earth behind the abbey, where the weeds grew long. The low hill protected them there, and he pulled harder, forcing her to run. He knew they’d be coming soon.

  “We need to get away,” he told her. “I’ll tell you everything when we’re safe, but what you need to know is that your father’s not dead. He wasn’t on that ferry in Tallinn. He’s alive. That means the people who want to kill him will stop at nothing to get you.”

  * * *

  —

  Vadik’s eyes blinked open. He was facedown on the floor, his nose bloody where he’d fallen, his head split open with pain. When he reached back with his fingers and grazed his skull, he grimaced at the slightest touch. He pushed himself to his feet but then had to grab the wall, as his brain made dizzy somersaults.

  Looking around the cottage, he realized that Tati was gone. She’d left him alone to die or be killed. The bitch!

  He should have seen it coming. He should have known what was going on behind those cool calculating eyes. Her plan had never been for the two of them. She’d always intended to leave him behind, and she’d enlisted the old man to help her.

  Vadik veered toward the back door, using the walls for support. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. The hallway floated in front of him, and the first time he reached for the doorknob, he missed. Then he yanked it open and staggered into the night air.

  That was when shots exploded, bursting like distant gunfire from the other side of the cottage. Near the abbey. He reached to his belt and realized that he still had his gun. Tati and Maxim hadn’t taken it. He grabbed the pistol and shook off the fog in his head as he headed for the back gate.

  He needed to get away.

  He needed a plan!

  “Vadik!”

  The voice called from behind him, and he spun around in terror. A small, lithe woman with jet-black hair stood at the far corner of the cottage, her gun aimed at his chest. She knew him! She knew who he was!

  “Vadik, don’t move. Don’t go past the fence. If you do that, you’ll be dead in seconds.”

  He stayed where he was. “Who are you?”

  “Interpol.”

  “Fuck! Oh, shit!”

  “Where’s Tati?”

  “She left! She ran away! She left me to be killed!”

  “Drop your gun, and come with me,” the woman told him. “Prison is better than dead, Vadik.”

  But it wasn’t. If he had a choice, he’d pick death. He wasn’t going to let them lock him in a little room for the sin of trying to save the planet. And if they did, he’d be dead anyway. They’d come to kill him, wherever he was.

  Vadik pulled the trigger on his gun, and the woman ducked back behind the corner of the cottage. As she did, Vadik ran for the gate that led out into the fields. He was still dizzy, still struggling not to fall. He crossed past the overgrown hedge into the open fields that led to the cliff, but as he did, he saw four men standing near SUVs parked on the cottage road.

  They were all armed with rifles.

  As soon as they saw him, they raised their guns and opened fire. Vadik screamed in panic and hit the ground and crawled away like a frightened crab. He couldn’t crawl fast enough, so he got up and ran, but as soon as he did, a bullet landed in his shoulder, a hot missile ripping through his flesh.

  They shot me!

  Oh, my God, they shot me!

  He zigzagged, but the men fired repeatedly, and he felt another bullet tear into his calf, driving him down to one knee. He crawled again, finally reaching the back wall of the cottage, where he was shielded from the gunfire. But they’d be after him soon. So would the woman. He had to get away.

  The Renault.

  Maxim had hidden the stolen Renault behind a horse barn in the back. Was it still there? He got up and limped across the gravel behind the cottage, trailing blood, feeling the strangest horrible sensation of ice and heat in his shoulder and leg. He kept falling, kept getting up. He reached the barn and used the wooden wall as a prop, clinging to it as he hauled himself toward the far side.

  There was the car. Waiting in the shadows.

  Vadik dragged himself to the driver’s door. His wounds burned like the surface of the sun. He dug in his pocket for his keys, and then he dropped them and moaned at his clumsiness. He leaned forward, pushing blindly around the floor of the car to find them, and when he did, he finally started the engine.

  He put the car in gear. It bumped over the rutted land, flattening out the weeds as he steered into the fields between the cottage and the cliff.

  They were right there, waiting for him. Four gunmen. As they fired, the glass of the side windows shattered around him, and the chassis shivered with the impact of bullets punching against the metal frame. Vadik hunched down and drove. He could hardly keep the wheel straight, and the Renault swung one direction, then the other. He steered across the wide-open fields. The town road wasn’t far. If he could reach the road, then he could get out of town. He could escape. He could start over.

  But he wasn’t alone.

  A man stood in the path of the Renault directly ahead of him. Tall, dark hair, utterly calm as the car’s headlights lit him up and the vehicle snaked toward him. The man had a pistol in his hand, and he raised it and fired a single shot.

  The windshield punctured. One deadly little hole.

  Vadik looked down and saw his chest covered in blood. He inhaled, but there was no breath. His throat was choked. He tried to move his arms and his legs, but his limbs had stopped obeying his brain’s commands. He slumped forward on the steering wheel, swinging it left, jerking the Renault toward a fence at the fringe of the promontory.

  Toward the cliff.

  His foot felt heavy now, weighing down on the accelerator, making the car go faster and faster. He couldn’t move his foot, couldn’t lift it.

  He didn’t even feel the car rip through the fence. All he felt was air.

  His world lurched downward. The car shot off the cliff at full speed and soared toward the raging water below.

  32

  Nova saw the car take flight. As it vanished, she spotted Lennon in the middle of the field. In dark clothes, he blended into the night, and he looked nothing like he had in the wetlands, but she knew it was him. He walked toward her with an unhurried pace, and regardless of his disguise, she recognized the odd, graceful gait.

  She lifted her gun, steadied her arm, and fired, but she was too far away to get a well-aimed pistol shot. Lennon didn’t flinch when the bullet whizzed over his head. She fired again, missed again, and knew she was wasting ammunition.

  Standing where she was, alone amid the long grass of the field, she felt exposed. Trapped. Not far away, men with rifles swung their weapons her way. She was an easy target, and yet they didn’t fire. Lennon and his operatives converged on her from two directions. Nova backed away toward the cottage, moving her pistol back and forth, wondering who would attack first.

  If she could keep them occupied, she would give Jason and Tati a chance to escape.

  As she neared the fence and hedgerow bordering the cottage, she turned and ran. She expected bullets to chase her, but the men held their fire. She cleared the open gate and then skidded to a sudden stop. Not even ten feet away, she faced a heavy blond woman in an athletic jacket zipped to her neck. The woman’s arms were outstretched, with the barrel of a gun pointed at Nova’s head. There was nowhere to run.

  It was as if they’d seen her coming. As if they’d known every move she was making.

  “Your gun,” the woman barked. “On the ground. Now.”

  Nova assessed her options, but she had none. She knelt and laid her pistol in the dirt, and then she stood up again.

  “Kick it this way.”

  Nova did. She realized she was near the end. She’d fought and won many times in
her life, but this time she’d lost. The blond woman retrieved the gun and tucked it away in her belt. She stepped closer and placed the barrel of her own gun against Nova’s forehead. It was hot; the gun had been fired recently.

  “Turn around. Go back out the gate. Don’t try any fancy moves. Lennon says you’re pretty athletic, but so am I. All you’ll do is give me an excuse to kill you.”

  Nova retraced her steps into the field beyond the house, where the men with rifles were waiting. They surrounded her, long black barrels pointed at her chest. She was outnumbered. Her brain spun through different possibilities for escape, but all of her plans ended the same way, with her dead body on the ground.

  With Nova surrounded, the blond woman holstered her pistol. She walked over to meet Lennon, who approached with the same casual walk he’d used before.

  “Good work, JoJo,” he told the blond. “Now tie her hands behind her.”

  JoJo retrieved a long stretch of zip tie from a pocket. She came up behind Nova and roughly shoved her wrists together and tightened the plastic strap until it was biting deeply into Nova’s skin. Then she backed away, as did the others, giving Lennon room. He walked up and stood in front of Nova, studying her face with a strange intensity.

  “In the wetlands, you were ready to kill me,” Nova said. “Now you’ve got me, and you tie my hands? What do you want?”

  Lennon shrugged. “Plans change. I need your help.”

  “You think I’m going to help you? You’re crazy.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Lennon stroked her hair, making her recoil. “But first things first.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Cain,” he said.

  He cast a glance at the sky and shot a sharp glance at JoJo, who grabbed a phone from her pocket. She manipulated an app with her fingertips.

  “Bourne has Tati,” JoJo informed him. “They’re heading toward the wall.”

  “It’s time to go. Remember, I need the girl alive. Nothing happens to her.”

  The team of assassins ran silently toward the abbey, quickly swallowed up by the darkness. Nova was alone with Lennon, just the two of them in the moonlight. He got behind her and shoved her forward with a little tap between her shoulder blades. She could have tried to run, but they both knew she wouldn’t get far. She struggled to free her hands, but they were tightly secured, so she hiked across the field, heading for the road that led along the abbey wall.

  The men with rifles, and JoJo, were invisible now, but they were all heading for the abbey. Heading for Jason.

  He was walking into a trap.

  * * *

  —

  Bourne held Tati’s hand tightly, and together they ran through the long weeds. They stayed off the grassy path, maneuvering through the brush where the darkness hid them. The clifftop gales covered the noise they made, but more of Lennon’s team kept spilling over the wall. Ahead, where the land sloped downward, he could see silhouettes hunting for them, spread out across the field. Half a dozen killers formed a semicircle, slowly tightening the net and drawing together like a pincer.

  When he looked back, he saw at least two others behind them, with the abbey framed in the background by the night sky.

  “How will we get away?” Tati murmured. “They’re everywhere! It’s like they can see us!”

  She was right. They could see them. He had the sensation of being watched. Even hidden in the tall grass, he could feel Lennon’s eyes keeping track of their every move.

  Impossible!

  But then he realized it was very possible. When he scanned the sky overhead, there it was, high above them, outlined in pinpoint green and red lights under the clouds. He could barely make out the whine of its engine, not much louder than the buzz of a fly, almost impossible to separate from the whistle of the wind.

  A drone. Hovering above the cliff, watching everything.

  Lennon had been spying on them all along. He’d seen them arrive; he could see them escaping. Which also meant he’d seen Nova closing in on the cottage. He had her.

  Bourne swung a rifle toward the sky. He zeroed in on the lights of the drone and fired. The first shot missed, and the drone tilted and veered away. Bourne led it with the barrel of the rifle like a skeet shooter, and with the next shot, he brought it down. The drone didn’t just crash. Lennon must have built in some kind of self-detonating capability, because the machine exploded in midair, lighting up the sky like a miniature bomb, causing a ball of fire that scattered a cloud of debris over the field.

  “At least he can’t see us now,” Jason said.

  But they couldn’t go back to the car, because Lennon would be waiting for them. He glanced over the wavy tops of the weeds and could see men homing in on their location on three sides, getting closer with each step.

  “On your stomach,” Jason told Tati.

  They flattened on the ground. He tapped her shoulder to make her slither forward next to him. He didn’t care about the noise they made, not with the wind wildly blowing around the field. When they’d gone twenty yards, he stopped and aimed the barrel of the rifle through the long grass. He focused on one of the killers hunting them and squeezed off a shot.

  The rifle cracked.

  The man fell.

  Before anyone could find him, he re-located and fired again. And again. He took down two more.

  “Fast,” Bourne said. “Move fast.”

  They snaked forward, re-locating as men ran toward them, drawn by the gunfire. One came directly at them, thundering through the weeds, about to run right over the top of them. Bourne waited. He reached to his ankle and slid out a knife from a scabbard. As the man’s foot crashed down inches away, he took hold of the man’s ankle and tripped him face-first into the weeds. Bourne was on the man’s back instantly, drawing the blade across his throat and holding him there while he twitched.

  Beside him, Tati threw up.

  Jason started to pull her away on her hands and knees, but he sensed more movement close by. Another man was there, bent over as he prowled through the field, hacking at the weeds with the barrel of his gun. Jason rolled onto his back and timed his assault. As the man swished the rifle above him, Bourne grabbed the barrel and pulled hard, and simultaneously, he jabbed a fist into the man’s throat, making him choke. He dragged the man down into the weeds and knocked the rifle barrel hard across his temple. The man’s eyes closed; he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Tati stared at him, her mouth open in fear, her eyes wide. He knew what he must look like, his body covered in dirt, his face, hair, and clothes soaked with blood.

  “What kind of man are you?” she murmured.

  “This kind,” he said wearily.

  He jumped to his feet with the rifle in his hand. Driven by a surge of adrenaline, he fired, spinning as he took each shot, taking out three other killers in the field, one bullet for each of them. Then he grabbed Tati’s hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “We need to run.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

  “More men are coming.”

  “I can’t,” she said again.

  Jason realized they were too late. Across the field, he saw lights, and with a loud clang, a black SUV crashed through the metal gate that separated the abbey grounds from the road. Three more SUVs followed. The vehicles screeched to a stop on the gravel road, and half a dozen more men poured from inside. There were too many men, too many guns. They spread out, rifles aimed at him and Tati, no one firing. A woman with blond hair that flew in the breeze got out from behind the wheel of one of the SUVs and walked in his direction.

  They were in no hurry now. They had him, and they knew it.

  “Drop your guns,” she called. “Do it, Cain.”

  She aimed a rifle at him, but she didn’t shoot. He understood. She didn’t want to risk the bullet going wrong and hitt
ing Tati instead. They wanted her alive. Tati was their leverage to get to Grigori Kotov.

  Bourne kept his rifle aimed toward the woman as she marched toward him. He could kill her, but he couldn’t kill all of them. They confronted each other in a wary standoff, but the assassins around him had the advantage, gradually forming a huge circle that trapped him where he was. He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. The sand was running out of the hourglass.

  “What do we do?” Tati asked.

  “Nothing. They want you, not me. They won’t hurt you.”

  Jason saw a man emerge from the lead SUV. He was tall, with black hair, with a face that Bourne had never seen. But the disguise didn’t work anymore. It was him. Lennon wasn’t alone. Nova was with him, her hands tied behind her back. Seeing her, Jason’s heartbeat took off.

  “Let’s all be calm, shall we?” Lennon called. He took a pistol from his pocket and placed it against Nova’s head. “Cain, it’s time to face reality and give up. If you fire one more bullet, if you kill one more of my men, then I kill Nova. You don’t want that, do you? Put the rifle on the ground.”

  Bourne didn’t move. He stared across the dark field, his eyes locked on Nova. She stared back at him with a silent passion. He knew what she wanted him to do. Fight. Run. Forget about her.

  “We can make a deal,” Lennon said. “You give me Tati Reznikova. I give you Nova. Even trade.”

  Bourne shook his head slowly. “You think I’d trust you?”

  Lennon replied with a little smile. “I’m devastated. Of course, you’re right—you’re not walking away from here alive. Not this time. The only question is whether Nova dies, too. That’s the choice you face, Cain. So here’s an alternate deal. Give me Tati right now. I won’t kill Nova. I give you my word about that. And JoJo here will make it quick for you.”

  “Jason!” Nova screamed. “Take Tati! Run!”

  Lennon jabbed the gun hard into the side of Nova’s face, and she fell silent.

  “She loves you,” Lennon said. “How sweet is that. But you’re a professional. You know when you’ve lost. Why take anyone else with you? Look around, there’s no way out of here. You’ve kept up the supremacy of Jason Bourne for a long time, but every winner falls to a challenger eventually.”