With the windows rolled down on his rented Toyota Highlander, Bourne could smell salt air blowing in from the Pacific Ocean a block away. Hundreds of mop-top palm trees dotted the streets of Long Beach. He took a slug of coffee, then focused his Canon binoculars on the circular tower of the condominium building on Ocean Boulevard. Rod Holtzman owned a tenth-floor unit with a beachside view, the kind of high-end apartment that should have been well beyond the reach of a twenty-eight-year-old worker in the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation Department. But Bourne doubted that anyone in the parks department would have known who Rod Holtzman was.
He isolated the man’s unit in his field of view. He’d been checking the condo since before sunrise an hour ago, and he finally saw movement on the balcony. The curtains swept aside. The glass patio door slid open. Holtzman emerged, drinking coffee like Bourne was, wearing only a pair of plaid boxer shorts. He was tall, with a lean physique, his face square, his brown hair short and unruly. He had the California tan of someone who spent a lot of time on the beach. Anyone who passed him would consider him normal and forgettable, which was an asset for a man whose line of work was as a contract killer.
Who contacted you?
Who are you planning to kill?
Time to find out.
Bourne had Holtzman’s private cell phone number. Cody had given it to him. He tapped a single word into his own phone and sent the killer a text message.
Fahrenheit.
Seconds later, through the binoculars, he watched the man pick up his phone from a glass table on the balcony. Holtzman checked it, then closed and locked the patio door in his condominium, and disappeared.
According to Cody, Holtzman received a monthly retainer to reserve the hit man’s exclusive services. Ten thousand dollars in cash. On a random day every month, Cody sent a courier to Alamitos Beach. Holtzman provided the courier with the designated code word and received an envelope with the money.
Fahrenheit was the December code. The text told Holtzman it was time for the delivery on the beach.
Bourne and Cody had arranged the timing in Estonia. He hated having the Russian sadist as a partner, but for now, he had no choice.
Tati! If he didn’t get the Files, she died.
Jason got out of the Highlander, crossed the parking lot, and jogged up the steps that led to Shoreline Drive. He continued around the corner to the wide expanse of Ocean Boulevard, and he waited for Holtzman to emerge from the condo tower. Ten minutes later, the killer appeared, dressed in a tank top and shorts, a baseball cap over his brown hair. Holtzman set off on foot for the beach, which Bourne estimated gave him at least half an hour before the man would complete the drop and return.
He checked his surroundings before going inside. The morning Long Beach traffic was heavy. Four blond teenagers, two boys, two girls, passed him in beachwear on their way to the ocean. Across the street was a coffee shop, and he could see a handful of people at the tables inside. An older woman in a business suit swirling a tea bag in a mug. A twentysomething Chinese man with red glasses and spiky black hair, using two thumbs to play a game on his phone. Two IT geeks typing on dueling laptops.
No surveillance.
Bourne entered the tower and slipped a magnetic key card out of his wallet. Shadow had given it to him on the Treadstone jet—the latest in universal access technology. A tap of the card got him into the tower’s private residence elevator, and he selected the tenth floor. When he was there, he took the empty hallway to the door for unit 1027, where Holtzman lived. Using the same card, he heard the lock click open, and he went inside, drawing his Glock as he did. He wasn’t sure if Holtzman would have an alarm or internal cameras, but apparently the man was confident enough in his cover that he didn’t opt for additional security.
Or, more likely, he didn’t have faith in technology that could be hacked. Where there was a Wi-Fi camera, some stranger could be watching.
He holstered his gun and slipped plastic gloves over his hands. He checked his watch again, giving himself twenty minutes inside the apartment. The condo wasn’t large, two bedrooms and two baths, and it was sparsely but expensively furnished. There was almost nothing personally identifiable inside, no photographs, nothing but generic artwork on the walls. He crossed through the living room to the balcony, which looked out toward the water and toward another condo tower across the street. Quickly, he surveyed the rooms in the other building with a pair of pocket binoculars, checking whether anyone had a telescope or camera pointed this way. He saw nothing. The person who had the Files didn’t appear to be surveilling Holtzman to make sure the job got done.
Bourne stopped.
Was that a noise?
He waited, listening for the sound to repeat itself, but he heard nothing. Even so, he moved faster. The nearest doorway out of the living room led to a spare bedroom that Holtzman used as an office. Bourne saw a desk and computer at the window, and he booted it up with a Treadstone thumb drive in the USB-C port. Shadow had told him the beta device would be able to unlock most password-protected hard drives, but it might take several minutes to do so. He didn’t think he had the time. Even so, he let the computer spin while he checked the rest of the room.
One wall was completely paneled in oak. Bourne thought that was a strange design choice in a condo that was otherwise painted with nothing but white walls. He approached the wall and tapped lightly on the wooden panels, and the hollow sound told him that there was a gap behind the facade. It took him a couple of minutes to find a panel near the floor that unlocked a floor-to-ceiling seam with a quiet click. Both sides of the paneling folded like accordions, and when he opened up the wall, he found a pegboard and shelves that contained the hit man’s arsenal.
It was impressive. A dozen semiautomatic pistols, mostly Glocks, but also a couple of H&K and Ruger models. A Daniel Defense V7 rifle. An MK 22 sniper rifle. Boxes of ammunition. Two dozen blades of varying lengths. A bone saw. Chemicals for anesthesia, chemicals for cleaning scenes, chemicals for dissolving bodies. Fast- and slow-acting poisons. Thallium. Cyanide. Tetrodotoxin.
Depending on the job, Holtzman had plenty of options to kill.
“Holy shit, what’s all that?”
A woman’s voice screeched behind him.
Bourne spun, his Glock already back in his hand. On the other side of the bedroom, a woman of about thirty stood in the doorway, the whites of her dark eyes huge with fear. She had messy black hair and wore a sports bra and shorts, and she had Celtic tattoos across most of her chest. When she saw his gun, her mouth fell open as she inhaled to scream. Bourne crossed the room at a run and clapped a hand over her face. He cut off her cry just as it left her throat.
“Who are you?” he hissed. He shoved the barrel of the Glock into her temple and added, “Don’t scream. If you scream, I’ll be forced to do something I don’t want to do.”
He lowered his hand, but left the gun at her head.
“Mindy,” she stuttered. “I’m Mindy. Oh my God, don’t hurt me!”
“Are you Holtzman’s wife? His girlfriend?”
“Who?”
“Rod Holtzman. The man who lives here.”
She shook her head over and over. Tears poured down her cheeks. “His profile name was Paul. That’s all I know about him. I met him last night, and we came back here. Please! Please, let me go, I don’t know anything!”
“How did you meet him?”
“An app. A dating app for L.A. singles.”
“Does he know who you are?”
“Well, Mindy’s my real name, but I made up a fake last name. Everybody does!”
“Did you give him any details about your life?”
“I said I was a nurse. I am. But that’s all. What’s going on? Who is he? Who are you?”
Bourne closed his eyes. He checked his watch and saw that he was running out of time.
Shit! If he left Mindy here, she’d never stay quiet about what she saw. Holtzman would kill her as soon as he returned and realized she knew his secrets.
“Did you talk to him this morning?”
“Yes, he said he was going to get us breakfast. I went back to sleep.”
“So he expects you to be here when he gets back?”
“Sure. I mean, I figured we would—you know—again—”
Bourne holstered his Glock. He took the woman by the hands. “Mindy, you need to listen to me. If you see this man again, ever, anywhere, it means he’s going to kill you. Do you understand me? The only reason he will track you down is to murder you.”
“Oh, fuck! Oh my God!”
“If you see him, don’t let him get close to you. Scream, run, get away. You can see from what’s on the wall the kind of man he is. Do you understand me?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Get your things, and get out of here. Delete your profile on that dating app. Delete the app from your devices. Never open it again. Don’t tell anyone what you saw here, not family, not friends, not the police. My advice is that you quit your job and move. Get out of California. Nurses can find work anywhere. You may be safe staying where you are, he may not be able to find you, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Jesus!”
“Now go.”
Mindy turned away, but before she could run from the bedroom, Bourne grabbed her hand again. He decided to gamble.
Don’t fight the unexpected. Turn it to your advantage.
Treadstone.
“Wait a minute. I need you to do something for me,” he said.
“What is it? What?”
Bourne spotted a pad of paper and pen on Holtzman’s desk. He grabbed them and gave them to Mindy. “Write a note. Write it down exactly like I tell you. Okay? The note may help keep you safe. He’ll think you’re not who you said you were, that you’re working for someone else. If he believes that, then he won’t bother trying to find you.”
He recited what he wanted her to say, and she didn’t ask any questions. She simply wrote it down word for word, but she had to labor to keep her hand steady. When the note was done, he told her again to get her things and go. The woman disappeared in a frantic run to the other side of the bedroom, and barely a minute later, he heard the slam of the door as Mindy escaped from Holtzman’s apartment.
Silence returned. Bourne was alone again.
The paneled wall hiding the killer’s arsenal was still open, revealing its trove of weapons. He left it that way. The Treadstone device hadn’t been able to unlock Holtzman’s computer, so he yanked it out of the USB drive and shoved it back in his pocket. But he left the computer on. Better to let the man wonder if his data had been hacked.
Bourne crossed to the master bedroom on the other side of the condo. It smelled of sex and alcohol. He confirmed that Mindy hadn’t left anything behind, and then he left the handwritten note on a pillow above the tangled sheets.
He read it again:
Hi Rod,
Thanks for last night. Our mutual friend says hi.
You have twenty-four hours to do the job. If not, everyone will know who you are.