As they left the zoo, Scott stopped at his Corvette and retrieved a small leather-bound box from the glove compartment. Bourne then drove the two of them deeper into the desert in his rented Land Rover. When he was sure they weren’t being followed, he pulled onto the shoulder of a highway called Mile Wide Road, with nothing but empty desert around them. Thousands of saguaros jutted up like totem poles from the flat, rocky landscape, and mountains ringed the horizon. The falling sun flirted with the peaks.
Bourne dropped the tailgate. They sat next to each other amid the rush of the desert wind, surrounded by gray shadows. A few hawks circled far above them in the blue sky. Scott opened the small box, which contained a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Dalmore single malt whisky, plus two Waterford crystal tumblers. The congressman poured shots for each of them, spilling a little with his trembling hands.
“I always keep this bottle with me,” Scott said. “Virginia and I first tasted the Dalmore on our honeymoon in Scotland in 1988. Helluva trip, helluva drink. After that, we always had some on hand for anniversaries. Since she died, I’ve nursed this last bottle, only dipping into it now and then. But you can only hold on to the past for so long.”
They clinked the tumblers. Both drank the shots down in a bracing swallow.
Bourne saw the congressman wipe a tear from his eye and inhale with a large sniffle. Carefully, the man cleaned the glasses with a small white cloth, then shut away the bottle and glasses in the leather box again.
“Virginia had a slow-moving form of ALS,” Scott told him after a long silence. “It started with numbness in her leg. She progressed to a cane, then a wheelchair. It began to get worse from there. This was over the course of three years. A nightmare.”
“I’m very sorry,” Jason said.
“Thank you. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what to say. Nobody does. Virginia bore up well under the torture, but it killed me seeing her that way, seeing the disease steal away her body.”
“A lot of people would consider extreme measures in those circumstances,” Bourne commented.
“Like murder?” Scott replied.
“Assisted suicide is legal in some places.”
“True, but not here in Arizona. And not for Catholics, I can tell you. Suicide wasn’t an option Virginia would ever have considered. For her, it would have been like giving up her soul. I went so far as to tiptoe around the subject once, and she shut me down. She was determined to tough it out to the end, no matter how bad it got.”
“What about you?” Bourne asked. “You must have thought about finding an easier way out for her.”
“Of course I did. But I did not kill my wife.”
“She died,” Bourne pointed out.
“Yes, she did. Of the disease. Of natural causes, if you can call what happened to her natural. I sat by her bedside and held her hand while she died in an excruciating way. Believe me, I wish I could obliterate the memory.”
Bourne, who’d had most of his own memories obliterated, said nothing.
“But all that makes me sound like some kind of hero,” Scott went on, “and I’m not. In fact, I humiliated myself and dishonored Virginia. I couldn’t bear for her to find out what I’d done. I didn’t want her to die knowing the kind of man I was.”
Scott studied the leather box of Dalmore, which was cradled in his lap, with a strange disdain, as if he wanted to throw it away into the desert. Instead, he lifted it up and pushed the box into Bourne’s hands. “Here, you take it. I don’t deserve it anymore. I’m just fooling myself.”
Bourne took the box from the congressman without a word and shoved it into the back of the Land Rover.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Well, this should be no surprise, but Virginia didn’t have much interest in sex after the diagnosis. Her body was betraying her, so it was difficult for her to celebrate her body, if that makes any sense. I didn’t push her. But me, I still had needs. Jesus, I feel dirty saying it like that. I was disgusted with myself, and I still am. I mean, my wife is dying, and I’m worried about sex. I figured I should be able to shut off those feelings, but I couldn’t. I needed some kind of physical release. And not just that, I needed someone to have a kind of intimacy with. That was what I really missed. Someone to talk to.”
“You had an affair?” Bourne asked.
Scott shook his head. “Not that way. Not like you’re thinking. No. I’ve slept with one woman my whole life, and while Virginia was still alive, I was determined to keep it that way. But what I did felt even more pathetic. I signed up for one of those interactive adult apps. Something called mygirlnextdoor. I saw it advertised on a porn site. It was supposed to be an upscale girlfriend experience, but let’s face it, it was a place for lonely men to jerk off to pretty girls taking their clothes off in private chat rooms. I signed up. I visited the site all the time, sometimes at home after Virginia was asleep, sometimes even in my congressional office. I was lucky an aide never walked in while I was . . . busy. Every night it was a different girl. All young, all gorgeous. They were mostly Russian.”
“Russian,” Bourne said sharply. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, I know a Russian accent. Plus, they’d tell me about their lives, and they were all from cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. I’m sure most of the shit they told me was made up, but even if they were fairy tales, they were definitely Russian fairy tales.”
Bourne frowned. “Go on.”
A faraway look crossed the congressman’s face. “Then everything changed for me. One night I met Irina. I’d seen her face in the private rooms, but she’d never been available before. Men were always with her, paying her, tipping her. But that night I was able to have her for myself. Jesus! She wasn’t like the others. Her body was perfect. Just perfect, oh my God. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old to look like that. At my age, it takes a lot to get me excited, but when she took off her clothes—”
He stopped, another scowl of self-disgust on his mouth.
“There’s no fool like an old fool, right? I gave her a lot of money. I stopped seeing the other girls on the site. I only wanted Irina. We arranged dates, times when I could log on and be with her. It wasn’t just sex. I mean, I won’t lie, sex was a big part of it. But I found myself talking to her, too. Irina was a good listener. She was smart, funny, well-educated on so many different topics. You couldn’t design a more perfect girl if you built her yourself. I know what it sounds like, but the fact is, I fell in love with her. It wasn’t the kind of love I had for Virginia, but I developed a crush on Irina that was like a tidal wave. She just washed me away. And I kept going back for more.”
Scott laughed bitterly at himself.
“I began to tell her things,” he went on.
“Personal things?” Bourne asked.
“Oh, yeah. Things I had never admitted to anyone else.”
“Do you think you were targeted because of your position in Congress? Do you think this was all arranged as a trap?”
“Looking back, sure, I wonder about that, but I don’t see how they could have done it. It was all anonymous. I never revealed my identity online. I never even showed any of the girls my face! Not even Irina! I was always in the dark, always in shadow. Fuck, I was so careful. I set up a PayPal account with a generic Gmail address for email. I literally never used that address or that account for anything except mygirlnextdoor.”
“But someone found out,” Bourne concluded.
“Yes. Someone found out.” Scott squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the tailgate with his fists. “I began to talk to Irina about Virginia. Not by name, of course. But I told her about my situation, about the ALS, about what it was doing to our relationship. Like I said, I craved sex, but what I really craved was intimacy. Irina gave me that. I poured out my heart to her. Stupid, sure, I know now it was stupid. Hell, I even knew it was stupid while I was doing it. But it felt so good to talk about how fucking awful it was and to have this beautiful girl listen to me. Like she really understood.”
Bourne let silence drag out between them for a while. “What else did you tell her?”
“I talked about how much I hated what the disease was doing to Virginia,” Scott said. “How she was suffering. How I wanted her suffering to be over. I felt incredibly guilty about that, but I said if God was going to take her, I wished that He would just do it and not drag it out. I said I wanted my life back. I said I would—I said I would do just about anything to give her peace.”
“And then?”
“The next time I saw Irina online, she was different. Colder. More distant. Uncomfortable. She gave me a phone number to call. She said it was contact information to reach out to someone who could make my problem go away. There was a man who could end Virginia’s suffering and make it look like an accident or natural causes. She said it would be painless, and I would be free. She gave me a code to use to prove to the person on the other end that I was . . . approved.”
“What did you do?” Bourne asked.
“I ended the call with her. I canceled my account on the website. I terminated the credit card I’d used. I never spoke to Irina again. I was terrified. You have to believe me, I never meant for something like that to happen. All I was doing was sharing my feelings with her. I never would have considered—”
Scott stopped.
“What about the phone number?” Bourne asked. “Did you call it?”
The congressman pressed a fist hard against his forehead. “Once. I left Washington, and I drove out in the country. I used one of those pay-as-you-go phones. I called the number. I don’t even know why. I guess I was curious.”
“Did someone answer?”
“A man.”
“You gave him the code?”
Scott hesitated. “Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked for the target name, the fulfillment date, and any special requirements. It was sickening. I could have been calling a department store with a phone order.”
“Then what?”
“I hung up. I threw the phone into a lake, and I got the hell out of there. For weeks, I was scared it would somehow all bounce back on me. But it didn’t. Months passed, and I didn’t hear a thing. I thought I was in the clear.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t. About eighteen months ago, I received an anonymous call on my congressional phone. A woman. She said she was sending greetings from Irina. Wondering how that special project worked out for me. I arranged to call her back that evening, and I got another pay-as-you-go phone. I called, and the woman laid it out for me. She knew everything, about mygirlnextdoor, about Irina, about Virginia, about the contact with the hit man. If I didn’t resign immediately, it would all come out, and I’d have to resign anyway.”
“Did you recognize the woman’s voice?” Bourne asked. “Could she have been another girl on that same website?”
“I didn’t recognize the voice,” Scott replied, “but I don’t think so. The thing is, she knew that I’d called the assassin. She knew where I went to call him. I don’t even understand how that’s possible. So it definitely went far beyond the website.”
“You resigned,” Bourne said.
Scott nodded. “Yes. One way or another, I knew I’d be out. If I was exposed, I might even have faced criminal charges for attempted murder. Even though I didn’t actually do anything—well, not really. But most of all, I didn’t want Virginia finding out about any of this. She was still alive, but she was failing. I didn’t want her knowing about my sins before she passed away. The things I did on the website. And the hit man. She didn’t deserve to die with those kinds of doubts about my love for her in her head.”
Bourne pushed himself off the tailgate. He stared out at the dark mountains, then turned around and faced the congressman. “You have no idea who approached you? Or how they found out what you’d done?”
“No idea at all.”
“Did you tell anyone about the hit man?”
“Sort of. I thought someone in authority should know about it. I mean, this man was a contract killer, and he was linked to Irina and the website. So I sent an anonymous tip to the FBI with as much information as I felt comfortable sharing. But I don’t believe there’s any way the agency could have traced it back to me.”
Bourne frowned, trying to assemble the puzzle pieces in his mind. An online porn star and a U.S. killer-for-hire. Somewhere in that unholy alliance was a link to the Files and whoever had them.
The Russians? They were behind the website.
The Chinese? They’d been hacking U.S. government data for years, and the assassins in the desert museum were both Chinese.
He wandered away from the congressman among the rocks and cacti adjoining the highway. It was nearly dark, and the air cooled quickly. He slid a phone from his pocket and tapped out a text to Shadow.
Have you had any luck tracing the two girls who were with al-Najjar?
The head of Treadstone replied a few seconds later. I just got a report on that. They were flown to London from Estonia specifically to meet him.
Let me guess, Bourne texted back. He met them on an escort website called mygirlnextdoor.
How did you know that?
Bourne put away his phone without answering. His next step was clear. He needed to find a girl named Irina.