Kotov pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. His stare traveled around the inlet, noting Lennon near the surf, eyeing the water for the boat that would pick them up. Carefully, he studied the cliff and the tall boulders guarding the inlet the way a spy would, assessing his odds in a no-win situation.
“Do you want me to apologize?” he asked. “Will that make it better?”
“It changes nothing. I know you’re not sorry.”
Kotov shrugged. “That’s true. I won’t deny that. We work in a business without morals, Nova. Only hypocrisy. Tell me, how many children have you orphaned?”
“That’s different.”
“Oh, yes? How is that?”
“The people I’ve killed weren’t innocent.”
“Maybe not, but their children were. You ruined their lives the way I ruined yours, and I doubt you gave it much thought. That’s the price we pay. That’s who we are. And as spies, we need to be careful about throwing the word ‘innocent’ around. Innocence is a shadowy concept at best in our line of work. There are plenty of things about your father you never knew. Things that would shock you.”
Nova jabbed her gun into his chest. “Do you want me to kill you right now?”
“I assure you, a bullet would be mercy compared to what’s ahead of me.”
“I know,” Nova replied. “That’s the only reason you’re still alive. Lennon promised me that you’d go through something worse.”
“You realize you’re delivering me into the hands of the very people who wanted your father dead,” Kotov reminded her. “I was just an instrument. By hurting me, you’re helping them. That’s ironic, don’t you think?”
“Like you said, there isn’t much morality in our business.”
She backed away, keeping the gun level. Near the water, she saw Lennon marching toward them on the rocky beach. Even as close as he was, he was still just a black shadow, barely visible under the night sky. But his gun was in his hand, too. She thought about trying to kill him. That was what she’d been trying to do for three years, and here was her chance. Eliminate Lennon, then eliminate Kotov. Then run.
When he came up to them, Lennon tapped the barrel of his gun against her cheek. He knew what she was thinking. “You’re welcome to try, Yoko, but remember, you’ve already crossed the line. There’s no going back.”
Nova said nothing, because Lennon was right.
“Ten minutes,” he announced, focusing on Kotov. “It won’t be long now. The boat is on its way. Then we can begin your long journey home, Grigori. Your old friend can’t wait to see you again.”
“I don’t scare easily,” Kotov replied. “I’ve been in those rooms in Lubyanka. I know what goes on.”
“Ah, but it’s a little different on the other side. In fact, it may be worse when you know what’s going to happen. You can picture the things they’ll do to you. You can see the deep dark hole you’ll spend your life in. Anticipation can actually be worse than the reality. Although, to be very honest, not in this case.”
Nova watched Kotov’s face screw up with an impotent fury, as if he wanted to throw an insult back at Lennon. But he didn’t. He took a deep breath, and he was cool as he smoked.
“You have me,” Kotov said. “You have what you want. I’m not putting up a fight. I know what’s in store for me. But my daughter has no role in any of this. She’s not involved. Let her go. You don’t need her for leverage anymore, and she’s not guilty of anything. Let her stay here in the U.S. and be a scientist. She’s no threat to you or to Russia. You can kill me, and Tati won’t track you down for vengeance like Nova here. She’s not like us.”
Lennon’s face broke into a strange grin. He gestured at the cliff where Tati squatted by herself, her head between her knees. “Tati. Come here. Talk to your father.”
When she didn’t move, Lennon jabbed a gun at her. “Now.”
Tati pushed herself to her feet. Her clothes were soaked, emphasizing her skinny limbs. She walked across the beach with her chin down and her shoulders slumped, as if this were a moment she’d been dreading. She didn’t look at Kotov.
“Your father says I should let you stay in America,” Lennon said. “What do you think about that?”
Tati chewed on her bulging lower lip. “I want to go home. Russia is my home. I want to go back to my job and do my work.”
“They’ll never let you do that,” Kotov told her. “Because of me, you’ll always be a threat. You’ll be an outcast. You don’t know these people, Tati. They’ll never trust you again. Ever since I left, they’ve spied on you, haven’t they? They watch you, they listen to you, they follow you. It’s because you’re my daughter. Now it will only get worse. They’ll put you in prison while they figure out what to do with me. If they ever let you out, you’ll be sent somewhere that’s probably worse than prison. I don’t want that for you.”
“You’re wrong, Grigori,” Lennon said. “Tati will be able to go back to her life exactly as it was. Minus her worthless husband, of course. She’ll be welcomed, just as she’s always been. She’ll hold a place of honor among our scientists. I’ve already told her that.”
“Tati, he’s lying to you,” Kotov insisted.
She shook her head, and she finally met his eyes. “No, Papa. He’s not.”
“Don’t be a fool!”
Lennon gave a cruel laugh. Nova didn’t understand why, but she knew that there was a secret here that had stayed hidden.
A secret that went all the way back to Tallinn.
“Three years to think about it, and you’ve never figured out the truth!” Lennon told Kotov in a triumphant voice. “I guess even spies are blind to those closest to us. Tell him, Tati. I think he deserves to hear it from you, rather than anyone else. Otherwise, he might not believe it.”
Her face screwed up with reluctance. “I don’t want to.”
“Tell him!” Lennon ordered.
Tati inhaled, trying to find the courage to speak. “It was me.”
Kotov cocked his head in confusion. “You? What do you mean? What are you saying, girl?”
“I’m the one who turned you in, Papa. I told them you were a spy. That’s why they came to get you.”
Kotov, who was a veteran of the KGB and a master of duplicity, looked shocked to his core. Lennon was right. He’d never suspected, not even for a moment; he’d never harbored a trace of doubt about his daughter’s loyalty. And yet she was obviously telling the truth. Tati had sent her father to his death in Tallinn.
And now he was going to die a second time.
“You’re a traitor,” Tati told him, her voice getting louder. “You raised me to be a patriot, to love our country, and then you sold your soul. You turned your back on everything you taught me to believe in. I couldn’t sit by and let you betray us. I told Putin what you’d done. How you were spying for the Americans in order to get him out of power. I did. I told him myself, face-to-face. And I would do it again.”
Kotov stared at his daughter. He took a long drag on his cigarette and looked up at the night sky. Then he shook his head with weary acceptance. “Well. What can I say? I’m glad it was you and not some bureaucrat.”
Tati didn’t apologize, or say she loved him, or tell him she felt any regret about the fate that was in store for him. She turned her back on her father and spit on the ground. Nova thought that was the gesture that hurt Kotov the most. He was nothing to her. Worse than nothing.
“I just love family reunions,” Lennon announced cruelly.
Then he looked out at the ocean, which stretched to the black horizon beyond the cliffs. Whitecaps were visible near the shore, but farther out, the water became a dark mass. Out there, getting closer and brighter, was the light of a boat.
“Time to go,” he said. He barked into his radio. “Nicholai, Winston, Paul, get back here now. When the boat’s here, we go.”
Nova saw Lennon’s brow furrow with the faintest concern. “Nicholai?”
He rattled off the other names again.
“Winston? Paul? Confirm your status. What’s going on?”
The radio stayed quiet. Lennon’s eyes shot to the massive boulders towering over the inlet and the waves that crashed and sprayed on the far side of the beach. Then he turned his gaze back to Nova.
She answered his question without being asked.
“It’s Cain,” she told him. “Cain is here.”
41
Jason walked from the rocks, his gun outstretched. The ocean blasted waves over his head. Squinting, he saw the light of a boat out on the water, and he knew there wasn’t much time. More men and more guns were heading this way. He crossed from the surf to the rocky beach, making his way toward the four people clustered by the cliff. The gales pummeled him, making it hard to stand.
He was too far away for a clean shot. Lennon saw him coming, and the man raised his gun, pointed back at Bourne. The killer stepped away from the cliff, walking out on the beach to meet Jason. A final confrontation.
Nova was there, too. He saw her watching him, but her gun never veered from Kotov’s chest. The Russian was her prisoner. This was the man she’d hunted, the man she’d wanted to kill since she was seven years old. If only one thing happened on this beach, she would make sure Kotov didn’t leave it alive.
“Why did you come here, Jason?” she called to him, her voice strangled with a kind of desperation. “You should have stayed away. I was trying to keep you out of this. I was trying to keep you alive!”
The sound of her voice stabbed at his heart. They’d been together in bed only hours ago. He could see her naked body in his memory, could feel her skin and the wild lust of being inside her. The passion of it swept over him like the ocean wind.
Stop!
Nova isn’t your lover! Not anymore, never again!
At the cliff, Tati broke away and ran to Jason before Lennon could stop her. Her gait across the pebbles was clumsy. She put up her hands, standing between him and Lennon.
“She’s right,” Tati shouted. “She’s right, you need to go! Leave, leave!”
“Tati, go back to the others.”
She grabbed his arm and kept pace on the beach beside him. “Get out of here!” she went on urgently. “You can’t win—you can only get yourself killed. And for what? For a spy who betrayed his country? For a woman who betrayed you? Go!”
Lennon called to her over the wind. “Get away from him, Tati. He’s not here for you or your father or even for his lover. Isn’t that right, Cain? We both know what this is really about. You’re here for me.”
The two of them stopped with only ten feet separating them, both of them with their guns aimed at the other’s chest. They could both fire. They could both die. Tati’s gaze went back and forth between them. She clung to his waist, and Jason could feel her heart hammering in her breast.
“You need to know the truth, don’t you?” Lennon said. “You need to know who I am before I escape. You’ve felt it for years, haven’t you? Your past is out there. Your past is coming for you. That’s why you push people away. Marie. Nova. Abbey Laurent. Oh, yes, I know about her, too. I know everything about you, Cain. I’ve kept an eye on you for a long, long time, waiting for this moment.”
Bourne’s finger twitched on the trigger. He wanted to fire, even if it meant his own death. But Lennon was right. He had to know what was hiding behind the white cloud in his brain.
Somewhere in that fog was Lennon. Who are you?
“You can’t escape it,” Lennon continued. “You can’t run away. Your past is right here in front of you. I am your past.”
“You’re lying,” Bourne said, trying to keep the agitation off his face.
“No, the real lie is in your head. Your whole life was a lie long before you lost your memory. The Bourne identity was always a fiction, a myth, something you and Treadstone created. Jason Bourne. The man behind Cain. You took the identity of a killer so that you could become a killer. You executed a man named Jason Bourne so that you could become Jason Bourne. If only you could remember it.”
“I don’t need a history lesson,” Jason snapped. “I’ve read the file. I know what happened.”
He squeezed the butt of the gun and tried to keep his arm level. Tati clung to his waist, making his aim unsteady. So did the wind.
“No, you only know what Holly Schultz wanted you to believe,” Lennon told him. “They can tell you whatever they want, can’t they? Because you have no memories of your own.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Don’t let him inside your head! Shoot!
“The real Jason Bourne never died,” Lennon said.
“That’s a lie. I killed him.”
“No, you thought he was dead, but you were wrong. Just like you thought Kotov was dead. Just like you thought Nova was dead. But Bourne survived. You stole his identity, so he had to create a new one for himself. He had to hide behind his disguises. He became . . . Lennon.”
Bourne blinked in disbelief. His gun hand wobbled; it seemed too heavy to hold. The roaring agony in his head came back, like the booming of the waves against the shore. Sweat made a film on his skin, growing sticky on his neck. Blurred memories popped in his head like floodlights shot into fragments, and a black shadow fell across his mind.
Just for an instant, he was frozen.
He couldn’t move.
Lennon spoke in a low, menacing hiss. “That’s right, Cain . . . I’m Jason Bourne! And I’ve come to take my identity back.”
Tati screamed. Just as Lennon’s finger twitched on the trigger, she leaped between them. She grabbed Lennon’s wrist and shoved his gun arm into the air. The bullet streaked harmlessly into the sky. The explosion of the gun jarred Bourne out of his paralysis, but he couldn’t shoot with Tati in the way. Lennon hurled Tati at him, their bodies colliding hard. The impact jarred the pistol from his hand. He saw Lennon aiming to fire again, and he threw Tati to safety. He was in the path of the bullet, with nowhere to run, but just as Lennon pulled the trigger, a fierce wind gust rattled his arm, and the shot barely missed.
Bourne lashed out with the toe of his boot and connected with Lennon’s wrist, fracturing it with a loud crack. Lennon gasped; the gun fell. From his belt, Jason drew a long knife into his hand, and Lennon did the same, using his uninjured arm. They circled each other and drifted closer to the water. Cold surf surged around their calves.
The light on the ocean got brighter. A boat neared the beach.
Bourne slashed with the knife. He made a sharp gash across Lennon’s chest that drew blood, but as he tried to pull back, Lennon wrapped his weak fingers around Jason’s wrist with enough strength to hold him where he was. The killer plunged his own knife deep into Bourne’s shoulder and cut jaggedly through muscle. The pain nearly caused Jason to black out, but he gritted his teeth and brought his other hand up sharply, bending back Lennon’s broken wrist. Lennon let go, and Jason drove his knife home, eliciting a wild scream.
They were locked in each other’s arms. Their faces were inches apart, their blades buried in the other’s flesh. Lennon butted his forehead into Bourne, dizzying him, then he piled his body forward and knocked Jason off his feet into the surf. Landing on top of him, Lennon pinned Jason down. One hand sank the knife deeper; the other ripped Jason’s knife from his shoulder. The next wave landed over them with a crash.
Lennon’s face loomed above Jason. The pain in his shoulder was a scorching flame, salted and stung by the seawater. But it was that face! That face above him, that face flashing from somewhere behind the fog.
A face, bloodied, eyes closed, gunshots in his chest.
You’re dead!
“You can see me, can’t you?” Lennon taunted him.
“I’m still in your brain. You can see my face, you can see the last fight we had, when you thought you’d killed me. But you didn’t. Now mine will be the last face you see, Cain.”
Lennon yanked the knife out of Bourne’s shoulder and thrust his arm back to send a killing blow into Jason’s throat.
Then there was a gunshot.
A gunshot so close it seared across the flesh of Lennon’s arm. And another, missing just over his head. And another, this time shattering Lennon’s elbow and freezing his arm. The knife fell into the water.
From the cliff, Nova stalked toward them, firing and firing.
Bourne cracked a fist across Lennon’s chin, and the killer rolled away, engulfed by another wave. Jason scrambled to his feet. Lennon got up, too, and staggered along the beach, with Nova’s bullets chasing him. Then gunfire erupted from an entirely new source. Out on the water, two men in a Zodiac fired toward the shore. Nova threw herself down to avoid the bullets raking over their heads, and Bourne had to do the same.
Still on his feet, Lennon spotted Tati. She was on her knees in front of him, covering her head with her arms. He dragged her up with an arm around her waist. She kicked wildly at first, but then didn’t protest as he used her as a shield and backed into the waves. The water got deeper and deeper around them, rising to their chests. The men in the Zodiac kept firing, pinning Bourne and Nova down, and all Jason could do was watch as Lennon hoisted Tati inside the rubberized boat and then was pulled inside as well.
The engine gunned with a loud throb. The boat rose up on the waves as it turned and accelerated out to sea.
Lennon was gone. So was Tati. On their way back to Russia.
Bourne pushed himself slowly to his feet. Blood poured from the wound in his shoulder, and he could feel his arm stiffening as the muscles seized. Nova stood up, too. She still had her gun in her hand. The wind played games with her long black hair.
He saw a look in her eyes, a look of danger. He realized that nothing had changed.
If only one thing was going to happen on this beach, Grigori Kotov was going to die.
The Bourne Treachery Page 32
