10

Bourne stayed on the flat, empty E20 highway through the darkness and snow. Dormant farm fields lined the ­two-​­lane road. He hoped to make it all the way to Tallinn, but half an hour outside Narva, Tati moaned as the numbness of the cold gave way to pain. Her shoulder began bleeding profusely. He checked the side ­mirrors—​­the front mirror had been shot ­away—​­and saw that they still had the road to themselves. No one was pursuing them. Not yet. Hopefully, the snow had erased their tracks and Cody and his men didn’t know which direction they had gone.

Two miles later, he spotted a lonely farmhouse tucked into a band of trees, and he turned off the highway. As they neared the house, he saw that it was in disrepair, the wooden siding peeling away and many of the windows broken. He parked the Citroën out of view of the road, and he helped Tati out of the car. The door to the house was boarded over, but he kicked it open easily. He led them inside and found that the owners had left most of the furniture behind when they abandoned the house. Other residents had moved in. Spiderwebs dangled from the ceiling, and droppings littered the floor. A large rat scampered through the glow of his flashlight. He draped Tati across an old blue sofa, and then he checked the go bag that Sara had prepared for her escape.

Sara had done well. He found a Mylar thermal blanket and spread the silver foil over Tati to keep her warm. Using the medical supplies in the bag, Bourne sterilized and bandaged her wound. The bullet had grazed her shoulder but not penetrated muscle or bone. She’d be fine in a couple of days. When he was done, he gave her a small bottle of Powerade to drink, and she began to improve quickly, the color coming back to her face.

He checked his watch and wanted to get back on the road immediately, but Tati wasn’t ready to go. She wrapped part of the thermal blanket around his shoulders as he sat on the floor next to the sofa.

“Let’s stay here for a while, yes? I like the quiet.”

“A few minutes,” Bourne agreed. “Then we need to leave.”

“Is there vodka in that bag? God, I could use a drink.”

Jason checked and found a bottle of Estonian Viru Valge. Sara had thought of everything. He opened the bottle and gave it to Tati, who took a ­Russian-​­sized swallow from the neck. When she handed it back, Bourne shrugged and did the same.

“Better,” she said.

Bourne smiled. It was better.

The blanket kept their body heat from escaping, but the house was still as cold as the outside air. Wind screeched through broken windows. After a while, Tati sat up and patted the sofa for Bourne to join her. He sat down next to her, and she clung to his body. She put her arms around him and leaned her head into his neck. The chain of the Russian cameo she wore was cold on his skin. They drank more vodka.

“How did you get here, Tati?” Bourne asked finally. “The last I knew, you were doing research at a climate university in St. Petersburg.”

She shivered a little against him.

“The war,” she said. “The war changed everything.”

“But you were protected. You were close to Putin and the siloviki.”

“Not close enough. I made a mistake by speaking out. I said what Putin was doing in Ukraine was wrong. Barbaric. One day at the university, I heard they were coming for me, to make an example for others to stay silent. My choice was to be tossed in prison or to run. So I ran. All I had was the clothes on my back. No money. No identity. I made my way to the border at Narva, but I had no way to cross. And yet I needed to get out of Russia. That was when I heard about Cody.”

Bourne heard sourness and shame take over Tati’s voice.

“Cody controls this region on both sides of the river,” she went on. “He can make anything happen. I didn’t tell him who I was, but that didn’t matter. He already knew. He could have destroyed me with a phone call. But he told me there was another way. I could earn my way across the border.”

“The website,” Bourne said.

Tati’s head moved gently, and her cheek was soft against his neck. “Yes. He said I was perfect. I spoke English. I’m pretty. Plus, I have no inhibitions. I don’t care if people see my body. Sex means nothing to me. You remember my husband, Vadik? I learned not to care about sex because of him. All men are like Vadik. Well, maybe except for you.”

Bourne said nothing. After he’d rescued her in Whitby, he remembered her coming to his bed at a safe house in London. She’d offered to sleep with him, not because she was in love with him, not because she had any desires herself, but because she wanted to thank him for saving her life. To Tati, sex was simply a way to give men what they wanted, and she was surprised when he turned her down.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“Cody got me over the river to Narva. He set me up in an apartment in town. But I still had no money. No identification. He said if he was happy with my work, then the day would come when he would set me free. At first I believed him, but the more I talked to other girls, the more I realized we were really slaves.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A year and a half.”

“What did he have you do?”

Tati took a while to reply. “Kepler took pictures. Every day a different outfit. Beautiful, expensive clothes, swimsuits, lingerie. Something to tease the men, you know? Showing off my breasts, my legs, my ass, my smile. They made me an Instagram star. I have like a million followers. But that was ­just—​­what is it called?”

“Bait,” Bourne said.

“Yes. Bait. Men who loved my free pics could sign up to see more at mygirlnextdoor. There, Cody posted the nude shots. Very explicit ones. Me touching myself. Me with toys. You know the kind. The price was very, very high. He wanted to screen out ordinary men. He only wanted those who had the money to pay for anything they wanted. Those were the men he wanted to influence.”

“But the girl wasn’t you. It wasn’t your face.”

Tati shook her head. “That was Cody protecting me. Or so he said. He said Putin was still looking for me, and if he found me, he’d send men to kill me or drag me back to Russia. So I took the pictures and the videos, but then Cody had tech boys who used artificial intelligence to create a new, younger woman out of the images. Irina. She is me, but she is not me, you see? I move, I pose, but the computer modifies me and makes me into her.”

“The men you met on the website,” Bourne said. “Did you know who they were?”

“Some of them. There were powerful men. Wealthy men. Some of these men I had even met. I’d met their wives, too. That was strange. I wondered if they would recognize me, but of course, it wasn’t really me they were seeing. It was Irina. But I enjoyed the power she had over them. I admit that.”

He felt her head turn, and her lips kissed his neck. Her hands began to explore, reaching inside his clothes, caressing and squeezing between his legs. But there was a strangely robotic quality to her movements, as if she really were nothing but a computer simulation. He took her wrists firmly and moved them away from him.

“I don’t understand you,” Tati said, her brow furrowing. “Why don’t you want me? In London, it was the same thing. I came to you, and you sent me away. Multiple times now, you save my life. I owe you. This is how I repay.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Bourne said.

Tati shrugged, still not understanding.

“But I do have more questions for you,” he went on. “Among the men you met online was a U.S. congressman. Wilson Scott.”

She looked puzzled. “I don’t know him.”

“He says he talked to you almost every day.”

“Well, maybe, but I don’t know this man.”

“His wife was sick. He says you gave him contact information for an assassin based in the U.S. who would kill her.”

Tati’s eyes widened. “Oh, Phil! That must be Phil. He was nice. I felt bad for him, what was happening with his wife. But he was cautious, too. I never saw his face. I didn’t know who he was. I’m not surprised he was powerful. He needed to have a lot of money to be with me. But I didn’t know his real name.”

“Cody never told you?” Bourne asked.

“As far as I know, Cody didn’t know this, either.”

“But Wilson Scott was being blackmailed over the hit man in the U.S.”

“Not by me. I don’t think by Cody, either. I never heard about that, anyway. The only thing I knew about was passing along contact information. That was the money Cody wanted to make. One hundred thousand dollars for a kill. I hoped Phil would do it. Better for him, better for his poor wife. But I never heard. After I told him about the hit man, he shut down his account. I never talked to him again.”

“Who was the hit man?” Bourne asked.

“I have no idea,” Tati replied. “I passed along contact details to Phil, but that was all anonymous. The person could be anyone.”

“So what happened between you and Cody? Why is he looking for you?”

“Apparently he thinks I gave info about the hit man to someone. The killer contacted Cody, furious. He said somebody knew all about him. This person was threatening to turn him in to the FBI if he didn’t do a job. He told Cody there was a leak in his organization, and Cody assumed it must be me. But it wasn’t. I never told anybody. That doesn’t matter, though. Cody sent men to get me, and I went to Ariel for help. That was when I found out she and her sister were really part of Interpol. They’ve been trying to get me out.”

Bourne put his head on the tattered back cushion of the sofa. Something scuttled on the floor near them, but he didn’t bother using his flashlight to see what it was. He thought about what Tati had told him and concluded that Billy Fox had been right. Cody didn’t have the Files. Someone else did. Whoever it was had hacked mygirlnextdoor and been able to find the real identity of Wilson Scott.

And the real identity of a hit man.

“We need to go,” Bourne said. “The sooner we get to Tallinn and get you out of Estonia, the better.”

“Yes, okay.”

They got off the sofa and made their way through the wreckage of the house to the front door. Bourne listened, hearing only the wild screams of the wind. The snow continued to fall, slapping their faces. He led her to the Citroën and situated her inside, and then he went around to the driver’s side and started the engine.

Before he could put the car in gear, bright lights dazzled him, forcing his eyes shut.

When he could see again, he made out the silhouettes of at least ten men surrounding the car, rifles pointed at them. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Then he heard a guttural voice booming through the storm.

“Please keep your hands on the wheel. Don’t make my men cut you to ­ribbons . . . Cain.”

*

“You really don’t need to come with me,” Abbey Laurent told her husband. “I’ve met Jerry before. He’s harmless.”

Garrett shook his head. “A conspiracy nut? Somebody who wants to meet you in the middle of nowhere? No, Abbey. I want to be there.”

He swung the wheel, guiding his Lexus convertible along the tight switchbacks of Decker Edison Road as it climbed into the Malibu hills. An ­emerald-​­green down coated the landscape, thanks to a rainy December. Creeks raced across the ­one-​­lane road, and the sedan’s tires splashed through muddy water. Garrett had the top down, and the higher they climbed, the colder the air seemed, whipping Abbey’s red hair into a bird’s nest.

The ocean crept into view behind the hills like a blurred blue glow on the horizon.

“We should be close,” she said.

Garrett slowed on the curves. “Abs, I don’t know about this. You’re writing a novel, aren’t you? It’s fiction. Isn’t that where you make shit up?”

“Yes, but I want the books to feel real. Peter Chancellor’s novels always felt real. That’s because they were grounded in things that actually happened. My last book? The one about the media disinformation conspiracy? I had people in Washington calling me up to say the novel should be required reading. That it was so close to the truth about media manipulation, they were wondering about my sources.”

“Washington,” Garrett replied with a cynical smile. His long dark hair was tied up in a man bun, and sunglasses covered his eyes. His beard made a neat line around his jutting jaw. “They’re the ultimate conspiracy nuts. I had to testify in front of a House committee, remember? Callie Faith kept trying to get me to expose all the data mining behind Jumpp. Like the Chinese were desperate to get contact info for millions of ­fourteen-​­year-​­olds dancing around to Taylor Swift songs. I told her I’d been through the code myself and didn’t see anything. And she still didn’t believe me.”

“Except you’re not so sure anymore, are you?” Abbey asked.

Garrett shrugged. “I said I spotted anomalies.”

“Well, I see anomalies in the fire,” Abbey retorted. “We’re not being told the whole story about what happened. The feds are covering something up. I want to know what it is.”

Her husband reached over and squeezed her thigh. “Just be careful, okay? The other day, you said someone was watching the house. I don’t like that.”

“It was probably nothing,” she replied, trying to convince herself. “Some stoner looking for an easy target to break in and grab cash or jewelry. I scared him away. I haven’t seen anybody around since then.”

“Uh-­huh.”

Abbey didn’t want to argue, mostly because that meant admitting Garrett was right. The incident in the night, with the stranger watching her on the balcony, had made her nervous. She’d had plenty of close encounters with danger in recent years, but Jason had always been with her to protect her. And now he wasn’t.

She pointed at a bluff at the end of a grassy trail leading from the road. A tall young man stood near the end of a high promontory, buffeted by the ocean wind. “There. That’s him. Pull over.”

Garrett steered the Lexus onto a narrow shoulder off the road, behind a red Toyota Corolla that had seen better days. Jagged boulders made a kind of guardrail where the land sank sharply into the seam of the valley below them. They parked, and Abbey picked her way past the rocks to the trail that led through the tall grass. Garrett stayed at her side. Ahead of them, about fifty yards away, she saw Jerry, whom she’d only met once before, outside a post office in Maryland. He was in his twenties, Asian, with wavy dark hair and feminine features, pacing nervously with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. A pair of ­high-​­powered binoculars swung on his chest.

“This is your source?” Garrett asked dubiously.

“You’re a techie. You know what nerds are like.”

“Fair point.”

They closed on Jerry, who saw them coming and began rubbing his hands as if wiping away sweat. When they were within earshot, he pointed a finger at Garrett. “Who’s he? I said I would only see you alone.”

“He’s my husband,” Abbey replied.

“Garrett Parker,” Garrett told him.

Jerry’s knee twitched nervously. His eyes narrowed, and he made a careful analysis of Garrett as if he were running him through a scanner. “I know you. I know all the tech bros. You’re a senior programmer with Jumpp, right?”

“I was. I’m a private consultant now.”

“Jumpp is fucking spyware,” Jerry snapped.

“Isn’t everything these days?” Garrett asked, as if he’d heard that comment thousands of times before, which Abbey assumed he had. “Social media, search engines, AI, we’re all dancing with the devil, spying on everybody else. That’s how the game is played. Abbey says you’re part of a hacker group. You try to get information that the government is hiding. Doesn’t that mean you’re a spy, too?”

“I do it to expose evil,” Jerry replied.

“Maybe so. Maybe you’re a good guy wearing a white hat. But I don’t know you. So you want to talk to my wife, you put up with me being here. Got it?”

Jerry scowled at Abbey. “I drove across the country to see you, and you don’t trust me?”

“You drove?” Abbey asked.

“You think I’d give my ID to the government by getting on a plane? If they knew I was on it, they’d fucking take the thing down. They can do that, you know. Crash it by remote control and make it look like an accident.”

Garrett rubbed his beard to cover his mouth and murmured in her ear in a singsong voice, “Fruitcake.”

Abbey put a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “Look. I trust you. You know I do. You gave me a tip that led to my first novel. It was legit. But that’s why I need to be cautious and why Garrett worries about me. I’m the one in the public eye. My name’s on the books. If they want to get to you, believe me, they want to get to me even more.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure you’re on the hit list, too. But you got guts. You keep doing what you do. We respect that. Plus, you listen.” Jerry shot a resentful glance at Garrett. “A lot of people just think we’re nuts.”

“I know you’re not,” Abbey said. “That’s why I reached out to you. I’ve heard rumors about the fire. The feds aren’t telling us everything they know. I figured if anyone had heard what was really going on, it was you and your group.”

Jerry glanced around at the nearby hills. He put the binoculars to his eyes to check out the nearest ridgeline and then let them dangle on the strap. “Oh yeah. The government is trying to bury this. No question.”

“Bury what?”

“How the fire started,” Jerry said.

“It was intentional?”

“Definitely.”

Garrett shrugged. “Everybody knows it didn’t start naturally. That was in the papers. The first responders on the scene said it appeared to be a reckless fire that got out of control. It was probably kids doing something stupid.”

Abbey shot her husband a look to silence him. She was a journalist, and she knew how to interview sources. You didn’t interrupt them or throw cold water on their stories. You let them talk to see where they would lead you.

“Go on, Jerry. Tell me. What have you heard?”

“This wasn’t just a reckless fire,” he retorted, eyeing Garrett again. “The fire investigators lied. They were told to lie. This was arson. Somebody wanted that fire to start, and they wanted it to be big.”

“Why?”

“To cover up a crime. A murder.”

Abbey blinked in disbelief. She remembered the lines she’d written, the draft of the prologue to her novel. Fiction made up from inside her head. From a single spark, infernos came. One little flame would hatch the egg that became a dragon. And the body left behind in the house would simply be one more victim.

“A body,” she murmured. “He wanted to hide a body.”

Jerry’s face flushed with excitement. “Yes! You know about that, too?”

Abbey felt her head swim, lost in one of those moments when her imagination blurred with reality. Her novel, the stories she invented, had begun to bleed into things that were actually happening. “Keep going, Jerry. Please.”

“There was a house being used as an Airbnb,” Jerry went on. “The owners had rented the whole place out. They found a body inside.”

“I remember. A woman. Her name ­was—​­it was Debbie, wasn’t it? Debbie Robertson.”

“Yeah, that was the name she used to rent the place,” Jerry said. “Thing is, it turns out her ID was fake. Fake name, fake address, fake credit card. Nobody knows who the hell this woman really was or what she looked like or why she was there. But the feds are sure she was the real target.”

“Why?” Abbey asked.

“Because that house is where the fire started.”