The border between Estonia and Russia was closed, the gates chained and locked, the river bridge empty of traffic. No one came or went through the checkpoint where thousands usually crossed every day. Putin had flooded the neighboring country with too many migrants, and the Estonians had finally had enough.
Bourne sat in a park near the border’s barbed-wire fence and stared across the water at a stone fortress located in the Russian town of Ivangorod. When he put a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he focused on a Russian soldier marching by the river’s edge with a Kalashnikov slung around his shoulder. The soldier, feeling watched, spotted Bourne and lifted the barrel of the rifle in his direction. Bourne didn’t think the man would risk an international incident by shooting across the river, but with Russians, you could never really be sure. He put down the binoculars and wandered away from the deserted bridge.
Despite the closed border between them, Russia cast a long, dark shadow over every aspect of the Estonian town. Everything about Narva had a Russian flavor. A third of the people had Russian passports. Nearly everyone spoke Russian. Many of the city’s buildings still looked like stone giants from the Soviet era. Even the old yellow paint on the walls had a drab Soviet feel. It may as well have been 1980, with the Cold War still hot.
There were also Russian spies everywhere.
Bourne stopped along the water and held up his phone, reversing his camera as if to take a selfie. He spotted the young man with the short, greasy brown hair and the heavy green combat jacket about fifty yards behind him. The man had picked him up at the hotel when he arrived by rented car from Tallinn earlier in the day. Bourne wasn’t sure if the man actually knew who he was, or whether the spies in town had standing orders to observe any American who came to Narva. The man made no effort to hide his surveillance, staring openly at Bourne and smoking a cigarette by the river. He may as well have been holding a sign that said: We know you’re here.
Was he one of Putin’s men?
Or was he connected to the Russian called Cody?
Regardless, he was an obstacle.
Bourne headed away from the river toward the heart of the town. A light snow fell, dusting the overgrown green grass with white. He neared the ruins of a building that had once been a hotel, its rows of square windows now open to the elements, its crumbling stonework covered over with graffiti. When he reached the far corner of the building, he turned right, temporarily out of view of the man following him. He approached one of the boarded-up doors and shoved it open with a sharp slam of his shoulder. The interior had a musty smell of dampness and mold. He hid in the shadows on the other side of the door and waited for the man to come inside.
A smart spy would stay outside and wait. Bourne didn’t think this man was smart.
A few seconds later, he heard footsteps, and he caught cigarette smoke in the cold breeze. The cracked-open door groaned on its hinges. The young man took a step into the hotel’s gloomy shadows, and Bourne whipped his Glock through the air into the back of his skull. The spy collapsed into Bourne’s arms, and Jason lay him on the wet floor and returned to the streets of Narva. He walked four more blocks, confirming that the man had been working alone, and then he hailed a cab.
The cab dropped him near a McDonald’s in the Westernized section of Narva, close to a large, modern shopping mall called the Astri Center. Walking inside was like entering one of a thousand covered U.S. suburban malls back in the 1990s. People crowded down corridors on multiple levels, bags in hand, as they did their Christmas shopping. Bourne knew where he was going. He took the escalators to the mall’s top floor, which was dominated by a gray planetarium dome that showed the surface of the moon.
He took his burner phone and opened the most recent photo he’d downloaded from mygirlnextdoor. It had been posted only two days ago. The photo showed a girl with long chestnut hair and a sweetly innocent face that belied the other pictures he’d found of her online, which were mostly nudes. She wore a tight-fitting white dress with tiny red polka dots, barely held up by thin spaghetti straps on her tanned bare shoulders. The dress hugged her curves almost like a bodysuit and sank low enough on her chest to tease the pink areolas on her large breasts.
This was Irina.
According to Billy Fox, Irina didn’t really exist. She was an AI creation. But in her latest picture, this imaginary girl was standing right here in the Astri Center, with the craters of the moon on the planetarium framed behind her. Bourne could also see the cropped fringe of an electronics store in the photo’s background, and he saw a clerk standing at the store window, ogling the girl in the dress.
The clerk was real. In fact, the same clerk stood twenty yards away from Bourne in the electronics store, ringing up a customer.
Bourne went inside. He browsed the shelves of phones and fitness trackers while studying the clerk, who was probably still a teenager. He had jet-black hair, a pale pimply face, and a bright smile. He didn’t look like a spy, and he didn’t look like he’d been anything other than an accidental bystander in the photo of Irina. If he’d been eyeing a pretty girl, it also meant that there really had been a girl in the picture.
When the customer was gone, Bourne went up to the counter. “Da zdravstvuyet tovarishch Putin,” he said in Russian.
Long live Comrade Putin.
The young clerk’s eyes narrowed as he decided how to respond. Even if you despised Putin, you had to be cautious about saying so in Narva. But Bourne could tell from his strained expression that the kid was no friend of the Russians.
“V Sibiri,” Bourne added with a wink.
In Siberia.
This won a broad smile, and the clerk nodded vigorously.
“I need your help,” Bourne went on, sticking with Russian.
“If I can. What do you need?”
Jason removed the burner phone from his pocket and called up the photo of Irina outside the planetarium. He tapped the screen, pointing at the image of the clerk in the background of the picture.
“This was a couple of days ago. You were here, you saw the photo shoot. You remember it?”
The clerk’s smile vanished. “Who are you?”
“I’m not the police, and I’m not with the intelligence services, either Estonian or Russian. But I want to know more about this girl.”
“She’s one of Cody’s girls,” the clerk replied. “I don’t want trouble with Cody.”
“I don’t know your name, and I don’t know who you are. We never talked.”
“Yeah, but if you found me, so can he. Particularly if anyone starts messing with Irina.”
“I’m not going to mess with her. I just want to talk to her.”
The clerk shrugged. “I can’t help you. I don’t know where she is or who she is. Her real name isn’t Irina. And she doesn’t—”
He stopped talking and bit his lip.
“Doesn’t what?” Bourne asked.
The kid shook his head. “I’ve said too much. You need to go.”
Bourne slipped a hand in his pocket and then put a two-hundred-euro note on the counter. “Doesn’t what?” he asked again.
The clerk looked around the store to confirm they were alone, and then he palmed the bill. “She doesn’t look like that,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s not her face. That’s not her body. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s a beauty, and I don’t know why anybody bothers making her look different online. I’ve been there when she does nude photo shoots, and she’s plenty hot. But when the pics come out, they make her breasts bigger, her hips wider, no blemishes on the skin, whatever. Plus, they give her a younger face, make her look like she’s sixteen or something. I guess that appeals to the online perverts.”
“What does she really look like?” Bourne asked.
“The real Irina—whoever she is—is older. Probably thirty or close to it. Really pretty, though. I’d take her over the fake-ass girl they create for the website. Her hair is dyed sort of lilac purple. She’s skinny, bony, small breasts, but in great shape. She wears black glasses, too, makes her look like a professor or something. She takes them off when the camera’s shooting, but she’s blind without them.”
Bourne listened to the description, and something pinged in his memory, as if he’d met a girl like that before. But he couldn’t place her. Then he tapped the photo again. “This other woman, the real one, she was here in the mall this week?”
The clerk nodded.
“And she’s one of Cody’s girls?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“How do I find her?”
“I told you, man, I don’t know.”
Bourne placed another euro note on the counter, but when the kid reached for it, Jason held it in place with his fingers. “You said you’ve seen Irina shooting naked. I don’t imagine they allow spectators around the girls, not unless you’ve got a connection with the model or the photographer. So if you don’t know her, I bet you know him.”
The kid sighed. “You didn’t get his name from me. Okay? If he knew I ratted him out, he’d beat the shit out of me.”
“I told you. We never talked.”
“Yeah, all right,” the clerk said, and Bourne let him grab the euro note and stuff it in his pocket. “His name’s Kepler. He’s my cousin. He finds most of the girls for Cody. He lets me help out at the nude shoots sometimes. Believe me, I’d be with him right now if I didn’t have to work. He’s got a new girl, a gorgeous redhead named Ariel. You’ll find them both in his studio. He shoots out of an old garage near the railroad tracks on Puuvilla. But if you go, you better be careful.”
“Why is that?” Bourne asked.
“Sometimes Cody shows up to bang the girls himself.”
*
Bourne found the garage on the south end of Narva. Railroad tracks ran beside it, but the tracks were overgrown with weeds and hadn’t been used in years. It was almost night, and waves of heavy snow fell from the slate-gray sky. The shells of abandoned cars, mostly Russian models, filled the gravel parking lot, but he saw one gleaming black Porsche near the building’s stone wall. He also spotted the red light of a security camera mounted near the roof.
It made him wonder if Cody was watching.
The rusted door to the garage was half-open. Inside, the lights were off. He shined his phone onto a concrete floor littered with tools and empty oilcans. The air was cold; there was no heat in the building. Bourne stopped to listen, and he heard a low murmur of voices somewhere in the darkness ahead of him.
He kept walking. The building was long and narrow, and although there were a few wrecked cars inside, it wasn’t a functioning garage anymore. He reached a wall with open double doors in the middle, and he went through to the other side. Ahead of him, a glow of lights illuminated a huge white sheet hung from the ceiling. The voices got louder, one male, one female. He also heard a whirring noise, the quick metallic click of a camera shutter firing.
Bourne slipped his Glock into his hand. If Cody was here, he wanted to be ready. But when he came around the corner of the white sheet, he saw only two people caught in the klieg lights of a photo shoot. One was the photographer, who wore a leather jacket and jeans. He was pale and bald, in his thirties, barking instructions at his model as he bent over a Hasselblad camera mounted on a tripod. The other was a girl with orange-auburn hair who was every bit as attractive as the mall clerk had said. She stood in front of the garage’s crumbling stone wall, caught by light from two sides. Her chin was tilted upward, her green eyes focused on the ceiling. She wore a white-and-silver fur coat, open wide enough to reveal one pink-tipped breast and the long bare expanse of her right leg.
The girl noticed Bourne first. And the gun. But she showed no fear. She broke pose, letting the fur coat hang fully open against her body, and reached for a bottle of vodka on a stool and took a swig. The photographer straightened up with an irritated curse, but then he sensed motion behind him and turned around and saw Bourne. Unlike the girl, he reacted to the gun with a nervous shudder.
“Who are you?” the photographer demanded, covering his fear with false bravado. “What are you doing here? What do you want? I’m busy!”
“You’re Kepler?” Bourne asked.
“Yeah, that’s me. I said, what do you want?”
Bourne holstered his Glock. “I’m looking for one of your models.”
“Why? Are you from the website? Shit, are you one of the fools who thinks the girls are really in love with you? My advice is, get the hell out of Narva. Men have shown up here before, and bad things happen to them, okay?”
“This girl is called Irina,” Bourne went on, ignoring him. He added, “I don’t mean the AI version who shows up online. I’m looking for the real girl who poses for you.”
Kepler’s sallow skin got even paler. “What do you want with Irina? Fuck, it doesn’t matter. I can’t help you, man. Go away.”
Bourne said nothing, but his dark eyes drilled into Kepler’s face, making the photographer wilt.
“Look, I already told Cody, and now I’m telling you. I don’t know where Irina went! For all I know, she skipped town. She’s not in her apartment. She’s not answering her phone. If I knew where she was, don’t you think I would have told him? Jesus!”
“What does Cody want with Irina?”
“How should I know? You think he tells me? If Cody didn’t send you, then you need to get out of here before he shows up and kills us both.”
“Do you know any of Irina’s friends? Does she have family in town? Somewhere she might go?”
“I don’t know anything about her. Cody sent her to me last year, okay? She needed money, she had no problem with nude pics. That’s all I needed to hear. She said she was from St. Petersburg, but she didn’t tell me anything else. She takes off her clothes, I take her picture, end of story. Cody and his men do the rest. She and I aren’t friends, and we’re not lovers. One time I hit on her, and she slapped me so hard I almost puked.”
“What’s her real name?” Bourne asked.
“Are you not listening? I don’t know! Trust me, you’re wasting your time. Cody has a dragnet for her all over town. If she’s within fifty miles, he’ll find her, and she’ll end up at the bottom of the lake.”
“Then help me find her first,” Bourne said. “You saw her a couple of days ago. What happened? She must have said something to you.”
“She said nothing,” Kepler snapped.
Which was a lie. It was all over his face.
Bourne reached for his Glock again to encourage Kepler to talk, but as he did, he glanced over the photographer’s shoulder at the redheaded model. She caught his eye, put a finger to her lips, and inclined her head toward the far end of the garage.
Bourne hesitated, then left his gun in the holster.
“If you tell Cody I was asking about Irina, I’ll come back here for another visit,” he told Kepler. “You really do not want me to come back. Understand?”
“Yeah, I get it, I get it. Fuck!”
Bourne turned away from the photographer, then headed around the high white sheet into the cold darkness of the garage building. He walked all the way to the entrance, where the outside light was mostly gone, and he waited.
Five minutes passed. Then ten.
Finally, he heard the click of high heels.
The girl named Ariel appeared through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her sunset-colored bangs hung down to her eyebrows, and her hair seemed to glow despite the low light. She made no effort to close the fur coat over her body, and snow blew through the doorway, melting on her bare skin from the full swell of her breasts to the V between her legs. Her green eyes narrowed as she stared at him.
“You’re looking for Irina?” she asked. Her voice was Irish, not Estonian.
“Yes.”
“And Cody didn’t send you?” Her lips bent into a smirk. “No, he didn’t, I can see that. His men are all stupid gorillas. Not like you. Well, if you want to find Irina, you better move fast. Kepler wasn’t fucking with you. If Cody gets to her first, Irina is dead.”
“Why?”
The girl said nothing for a while. She sucked on her cigarette, and the smoke enveloped Bourne. “If I tell you where she is, will you help her? She needs to get out of Narva. She needs to get far away from here. When you go, you take her with you, okay? Otherwise, you get nothing from me.”
Bourne didn’t make promises lightly, because when he did, he kept them. That was the opposite of all his Treadstone training, which had taught him how to lie to get what he wanted. He studied the beautiful girl in front of him, assessing whether this was part of a trap. But he didn’t think so.
“Okay,” Jason agreed. “Irina comes with me.”
“Good.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s staying in an apartment above an Irish pub on Paul Kerese Street,” the girl said. “She’s safe for now, but not for long. Cody has spies everywhere.”
“Do you know her real name?” Bourne asked.
“No, I don’t. She never tells anyone. To me and the other models, she’s just Irina.”
“Why does Cody want her? What happened?”
Ariel glanced back into the garage to confirm that Kepler hadn’t followed her. “He thinks she sold him out. He thinks she leaked the identity of one of his assets in the U.S. A hired killer. Now he wants to know who she told.”