Bourne showered in his room at the London Hilton, washing off dirt and tending to the cuts and scrapes all over his skin. The scalding-hot water eased the soreness in his body, but as soon as he dried himself off, the pain returned, making him move stiffly. The long hotel mirror showed a rainbow of bruises across his naked body. He was just over six feet tall, toned and muscled from his intense daily workouts, but in his late thirties, he didn’t bounce back from punishment as quickly as he once had.
His body bore many scars from his past, some from bullets, some from knives, wounds that all came with stories. But they were stories he largely didn’t remember. A few years ago, a bullet had left him floating half-dead in the Mediterranean Sea. He’d been rescued and taken to a lonely French village called Port Noir. Only the quick action of a drunk expat English doctor, who’d gone off the booze long enough to steady his hands for surgery, had saved his life. But he’d awakened as a nowhere man. He didn’t remember his past. He didn’t remember his identity. Even the name he carried—Jason Bourne—turned out to be one more fiction in a life created by an organization called Treadstone.
His real name was David Webb, but David Webb didn’t exist anymore. All that was left of him was a ghost.
Bourne got dressed again, this time in a gray British business suit. He returned to the Hilton lobby, which was a hive of activity even in the middle of the night, thanks to the murder of Faisal al-Najjar. Police, agents from MI5, and at least a dozen Middle Eastern men, some he recognized as Saudi embassy officials, clustered in small groups on the marble floor. Pretending to check his phone, Bourne eavesdropped on the conversations for several minutes, but when one of the MI5 men began to study him with more than casual interest, he continued through the revolving doors and left the hotel.
The rain had stopped. He crossed through a gaggle of tabloid reporters to Park Lane, where he had no trouble flagging a black cab even at the late hour. With no traffic, the taxi’s transit through the city was quick. He gave the driver an address on the south bank of the Thames, but when they reached the far end of Westminster Bridge, beyond the Houses of Parliament, he told the man to let him out. He took the steps down to the Queen’s Walk and noted a twentysomething woman sitting on the stone wall over the river. She had blue hair and wore a black dress over fishnet stockings and calf-high combat boots, with a white lace shawl draped over her lap. He assumed her gun was there. She didn’t look at him, which was a dead giveaway that she was the first of the watchers.
Treadstone took no chances when its new boss was in town.
He passed three more agents as he neared the London Eye, which loomed bright and motionless over his head. Beyond the wheel, not far from the railway bridge into Waterloo Station, he spotted a woman standing alone by the river. She was in profile, but he recognized her, as distinctive as a diamond on black velvet. Her dress outshined the surroundings, a navy-blue strapless bodycon gown that emphasized her wide, curving hips and came together tightly below her knees, with a slit to the middle of her thigh. She wore matching high heels. She should have been cold, but she seemed unaffected by the December chill. As he approached her, she turned to face him. Her wavy blond hair fell to her shoulders, and her face was beautiful but distant, with cool blue eyes and burgundy lips that showed no emotion or expression. She was in her midforties, but she had an ageless look that never seemed to change.
“Shadow,” Bourne said.
“Hello, David.”
He found himself irritated that she called him that. Not Jason. Not the man he was now. It was no accident that she used his old identity. Everything Shadow did was intentional, part of a psychological strategy. They had history together that made him vulnerable to her, and Jason didn’t like feeling vulnerable to anyone. More than a decade ago, when he was still a young man called David Webb, they’d been lovers. They’d been in love—or so he thought. He hadn’t realized that everything she’d told him was a lie, that she’d been grooming him and measuring his skills as an agent in the field.
For Treadstone.
It had been four months since he’d last seen her. Since he remembered her from the empty mists of his past. They’d been together on a small island off the British coast, which was when he finally found out who and what she really was—a spy climbing the ladder, about to take the reins of the entire agency. Shadow had appointed herself his handler. He’d report to her, directly, alone, like a new game of control between them.
Then she dropped off the radar. Four months of silence followed with no contact or assignments, until one week ago, when she’d left a message for him at their prearranged drop in Paris. I need you in London.
“You’re a little underdressed, aren’t you?” he commented.
“I was at the theater. I didn’t have time to change. Do you like it?”
He didn’t answer.
Her gown was part of the sexual game she played, like the double entendre of the message she’d sent in Paris. She wanted him distracted by her legs, by the swell of her breasts, by the aura of her perfume. She was like a museum sculpture he could admire but not possess. What bothered him was that her strategy worked as intended. Being near her again after so many months apart left him off balance.
“Al-Najjar is dead,” Bourne said.
“So I heard. What happened?”
He explained about the ambush on Piccadilly. The failure of the mission didn’t seem to faze her. Her blue eyes drifted away to the river and her deep red lips furrowed into a frown, as if her mind were calculating the next series of moves in a chess game.
Always turn a setback to your advantage.
Treadstone.
“Do you know why I wanted him?” she asked a few moments later.
“I assume because of the media reports last year linking him to the president’s son. With an impeachment scandal looming, Congress was after him to testify about foreign bribes going into the president’s pocket. Al-Najjar was the Saudi moneyman.”
“Very good, David.”
“Let’s stick to Jason,” he reminded her coldly. “Or Cain.”
“I thought you might want a little of your past back. At least when it’s just the two of us.”
“I don’t.”
“As you wish. Jason.” Her face remained inscrutable. “Anyway, the Saudis didn’t want al-Najjar talking to Congress. They had too much to lose if the financial arrangements became public.”
“You think they sent the assassins?”
“I’m sure of it. Mostly because they told me that was their plan. I was hoping we’d get there ahead of them, but he’s dead, that’s the main thing.”
Bourne stared at her. “You were going to kill him, too.”
“After I’d interrogated him? Yes.”
“Why?”
“The country doesn’t need another political scandal to bring down an administration,” Shadow replied. “Were there bribes? My God, of course there were bribes. The president has been lining the family pockets for years. Show me a politician that doesn’t do the same thing. But the extremists in Congress don’t stop when they chop off one head. They always want more. These fools are hell-bent on eviscerating the entire intelligence community, even if it means creating a national security risk. My job is to stop them by any means necessary, and that’s what I plan to do.”
“Why put me in the middle of it?” Bourne asked. “If you knew the Saudis were going to take him out anyway, why risk getting caught?”
“Because I wanted to know how al-Najjar was exposed,” Shadow explained. “Do you think I wasn’t looking into the president’s son myself? Do you think I wasn’t turning over every rock to get that kind of leverage? But I never got a whiff of his connection to al-Najjar, and as far as I can tell, nobody else in the intel agencies did, either. And yet the whole thing got splashed over the front page of the Washington Post. Details, dates, emails, bank records. Nobody should have been able to put their hands on that kind of information. But somehow, they did.”
“You wanted al-Najjar to help you find the leak?”
Shadow nodded. “Yes, but it goes deeper than that.”
“How?”
She didn’t reply. Not immediately. Bourne saw two older Brits walking side by side on the walkway toward Westminster Bridge. They were close, not even twenty feet away, talking loudly to each other. The men weren’t threats, but he was sure that at least two Treadstone guns were tracking them, and if Shadow gave the signal, they’d both be dead in a matter of seconds. Instead, she took Jason’s hand and pulled him next to her. She leaned into him with her arms around his waist. Her body was soft, her skin cool to the touch. Their faces were obscured. If the old men looked their way, they’d see nothing but two lovers silhouetted by the river.
When the coast was clear, she separated herself as if nothing had happened between them, but her presence lingered in all of his senses.
“There’s a database out there,” Shadow told him, smoothing her dress. “People are calling it the Files. We haven’t seen anything like this since Hoover’s death, when someone stole his FBI archives and began using them for blackmail. The exposure of al-Najjar is just the tip of the iceberg. Secret leverage is being used to influence policy and personnel decisions all over the government. Outside contractors, too. A few months ago, the CEO of a rocket component start-up in Florida suddenly pulled out of a Space Force RFP they were about to win. No explanation given. Wilson Scott, the senior congressman from Arizona, resigned last year in the middle of his term. Rumor is, he was ducking some kind of sex scandal. A member of the Joint Chiefs did a public one-eighty on Ukraine, then shot himself. Those are just the high-profile examples. The influence racket goes way down the chain. Everybody’s scared, but no one wants to talk about it.”
“Where’s the dirt coming from?” Bourne asked.
“That’s what I was hoping al-Najjar could tell me. How did anyone tie him to the president’s son? Where was the information stored? Who had access to it? There has to be a common thread linking this activity together. If a private or public database got hacked, I want to know what it was and who else is in it. That will give us an idea of the depth of our exposure.”
“Is there any chatter about who’s behind it? Foreign or domestic?”
Shadow shook her head. “Rumors are all over the board, but I don’t trust any of it. Nobody knows.”
“You mentioned the general who flipped on Ukraine,” Bourne said. “Wilson Scott was also one of the loudest anti-Russian voices on the House committee before Callie Faith took over. And it may be nothing, but al-Najjar had a taste for Russian girls, according to the concierge at the Hilton. That’s three Russian connections.”
Shadow’s lips pursed. “It’s worth checking out.”
“I got pictures of the girls who were with al-Najjar tonight. Can you find out where they came from?”
“I can,” Shadow said.
“I’ll talk to Wilson Scott,” Bourne told her. “If he resigned to avoid a scandal, somebody must have threatened him. Maybe that will tell us where the Files originated. And who has them.”
Shadow nodded. “Given what happened to al-Najjar, you should hurry. Scott may already be on somebody’s target list. He’s an obvious link in the chain, and there are other people after the Files. They may want to keep him from talking to us.”
“And when I find whoever has the database?” Bourne asked.
“Eliminate them.”
He stared into Shadow’s blue eyes. “What about the Files?”
“Get them for me.”
“To destroy the data? Or to use it yourself?”
“That’s not your concern, David,” Shadow told him.
Her voice had a hard chill. This time he didn’t bother correcting her about his name.
Bourne turned to go, but Shadow reached out and curled her cool fingers around his wrist.
“One more thing.”
He stopped and waited.
“When did you last see Storm?”
Bourne hesitated. He heard the code name Storm, but in his mind, he saw Johanna’s face. She would always be Johanna to him. Johanna was a rogue Treadstone agent who’d been declared unfit for operations. She’d manipulated Bourne the previous summer in order to locate Shadow and try to kill her.
Johanna.
There was a strong attraction between them. He’d fallen for her in ways he hadn’t felt since the love of his life, a Canadian journalist named Abbey Laurent, had walked away from him and his Treadstone world. But just like David Webb’s relationship with Shadow, Jason’s relationship with Johanna had been a lie from the beginning.
A betrayal.
He’d had a chance to kill Johanna when he discovered the truth. He’d had a gun pointed at her head. Instead, he let her go.
“I saw her in Paris a few months ago,” Bourne said.
Shadow didn’t look surprised. “You can’t trust her.”
“I know.” He didn’t add: I don’t trust you, either.
“Give Storm half a chance, and she’ll betray you again.”
“Maybe so,” Bourne agreed.
“I never asked when we were together. Did you sleep with her?”
“Why do you care about that?”
“I don’t,” Shadow snapped, but he wondered if he saw a flash of jealousy in her eyes. Then she went on. “Did Storm tell you about her plans? Do you know what she’s going to do next?”
This time Bourne was the one to lie.
“She didn’t tell me anything.”
In fact, Johanna had told him exactly what she was planning to do.
She was on a mission to destroy Treadstone. And Shadow.