The power came back on. Behind them, lights from inside the house glowed like square beacons through the fog.
Bourne knew what he must look like, covered in Holtzman’s blood. He sat in the open back seat of Abbey’s red Audi RS 7 as she tended to his face with a cool damp cloth. She stayed very close to him, only a couple of inches away. She used alcohol where the wire had cut his neck, and he flinched as it stung him. Then she covered the wound with a gauze pad. All of her motions were quick, tender, automatic, but she said almost nothing, and she avoided looking into his eyes until she was done.
When she eased away from him, they simply stared at each other. It had been more than a year since he’d seen her. Or talked to her. Or exchanged any kind of message with her. Physically, she hadn’t changed, her hair colored to a deep mahogany red, her skin and lips pale, her smart dark eyes always curious, always probing. But she had changed. This was Abbey Laurent, successful novelist, not the lost, struggling reporter he’d first met years earlier. In their time apart, she’d grown older, more sure of herself, more comfortable with what she wanted and didn’t want. He could feel distance radiating from her, and he sensed the wall between them. Her expression had a reluctance bordering on anger. He’d come back into her life because of a killer—he’d saved her life, which he’d done several times in the past—but that kind of violence was also why she’d sent him away.
She broke the silence first.
“You still have this way of showing up when I need you. Thank you for that.”
“I didn’t know you were here, Abbey. Truly. I didn’t.”
“Uh-huh.” She gestured up the driveway toward the house, where the dead body still lay near the front door. “So who is he?”
“His name is Rod Holtzman. He’s a contract killer.”
“A hit man? Coming after me? Somebody wants me dead?”
“It looks that way,” Jason told her. “Do you have any idea why?”
“Well, in the past, it was usually because of you,” Abbey replied, and he could hear a little bit of acid in her tone. “But now, I have no idea. It could be anything. My books get a lot of attention. They’re drawn from things that really happened, and even though it’s fiction, I get a fair amount of threats.”
“Anything recent?”
“Nothing worse than the usual nuts.”
“What are you working on?” Bourne asked. “What’s the new book about?”
“The La Sienta Ranch fire. That’s why I’m in this house. Some Hollywood guy offered to let me stay here. It’s close to the scene.”
Bourne let another long stretch of silence draw out between them. He noticed that neither one of them had mentioned the elephant in the room. The man Abbey was with. The man who was living in the house with her. The man who had kissed and embraced her while Jason was watching them.
Her husband.
As if reading his mind, she twisted the gold ring on her finger, but she didn’t say anything about it.
“What now?” she asked. “Do we call the police?”
“No. I’ll call my handler. She’ll send a team to take care of it.”
“ ‘She’? What happened to Nash Rollins? Wasn’t he the guy who used to clean up all of your messes, Jason?”
There was more acid in her voice. She looked away and bit her lip, as if unhappy with herself for how she was treating him.
“Nash got shot. He was nearly killed.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“He’s recovering. In the meantime, I’m working with someone else.”
“A woman? How are you dealing with that? Are you sleeping with her?”
“Do you really want to go down that road, Abbey?”
She frowned. “No, I don’t. Sorry.”
“Anyway, she’ll send cleaners. They’ll remove the body and all the evidence. But you’ll need to talk to—you know—you’ll need to explain it to him—”
Abbey gave Bourne a cynical smirk. “Really? You think?”
“Will that be a problem?”
“I have no idea. Strangely, using secret intelligence agencies to remove dead bodies hasn’t come up in our relationship before now.”
He took the comment like a slap, which was how it was intended. “Have you told him about me?”
“Not really. Not in any detail. I told him I used to be in love with a man named Jason. We broke up. That’s all.”
He didn’t miss her choice of words. Used to be.
“But he knows you’re you,” she added. “That you’re the one who saved us. I told him I needed a few minutes so we could talk. He’s discreet. He said he’d give us time. But I’m going to have to tell him something more about who you are. He deserves to know why we were almost killed tonight.”
“Look, Abbey, I’m sorry about all of this,” Bourne told her. “I don’t know how or why you’re involved in this mission, but if I’d known you were involved, I would have stayed out of it. I would have asked Treadstone to assign a different agent. I’m not trying to complicate your life. Not any more than I already have.”
She sighed and briefly closed her eyes. “No, Jason. Don’t apologize. I don’t mean to be a bitch. This whole night has taken me by surprise. Coming home, getting attacked, you showing up. It’s like a blast from the past, you know? I thought I was done with things like that when I left you. The truth is, I wanted to be done with it, okay? But I’m grateful to you. Really.”
Bourne said nothing.
“So are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked finally. “I mean, apparently I’ve pissed off someone pretty badly if they sent a hit man after me. What am I in the middle of? And how are you involved?”
“Have you heard about something called the Files?” Bourne asked. “I know you’ve got a lot of Washington contacts.”
Her face clouded over. “I’ve heard rumors, yeah. The Files are a hacked database with a lot of ugly shit for blackmail. Some of Peter Chancellor’s old sources reached out to tell me about it. They said it reminded them of the Hoover days. They wondered if I was putting it in my next book.”
“Are you?”
“No. Like I said, I’m writing about the fire. I don’t see any connection.”
“Well, I think whoever is running the Files is the one who sent Holtzman after you,” Bourne said.
She shook her head. “That makes no sense. I don’t know anything about the Files. I don’t see how I could be a threat to anyone.”
Bourne nodded. He didn’t understand it, either. He knew Abbey, and he knew she wasn’t hiding things from him. And yet, somewhere, there had to be a connection between the Files and her book. Otherwise, he saw no reason for Abbey to be a target. She had to be getting close to some secret that the person with the Files wanted to keep hidden, even if she didn’t know it.
“Listen, I should have asked you before,” Abbey said suddenly, touching his hand and then pulling back. “How are you? Are you okay? I don’t want you to think I don’t care, Jason. I do. Of course I do. I always will.”
He hesitated. The safe thing was to say he was fine. But the truthful thing was to say that Abbey leaving him had ripped his heart open and left behind a scar that didn’t want to heal.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you really?”
“Really.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“There’s a woman,” he admitted, not naming names.
“Your handler?”
“No. My handler was part of my Treadstone past. We were involved years ago, long before you, long before I lost my memory. Now she’s back in my life. I don’t think she wants a relationship. She just likes keeping me off balance. But this other woman . . .”
“You like her,” Abbey concluded.
“I’m drawn to her, but it’s difficult.”
“Difficult how?”
“Difficult in that we’re a lot alike.”
Abbey blinked. “Oh. Well, at least you didn’t say difficult because of me.”
“No, it’s difficult because of you, too.”
“Look, Jason, I hope you’re not—” She stopped and didn’t finish her thought.
“Still in love with you?” he asked.
Abbey stared at him with a terrible sadness, as if she had no idea what he would say.
“No,” Bourne told her. “I’m not. Don’t worry. I’m not sure I’ll ever be out of love with you, Abbey, but I’m not in love with you anymore. As for this other woman, she knows about you. She knows what you mean to me.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, you make her jealous. She doesn’t do jealous well. Actually, she’s the one who told me you got married.”
Abbey frowned. “Almost nobody knows about that. Garrett and I wanted to keep it low-profile. How did she—”
“She keeps an eye on you. She’s a wizard online.”
“Jesus, Jason. Should I be scared? I mean, it wasn’t her, was it? The one who hired the hit man?”
“She will never harm you. I promise.”
He wondered if that was a promise he could keep. But he knew he’d already told her too much, and he decided to change the subject. “Anyway, here you are,” he went on. “Married. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes looked away down the hill toward the ocean. “I wanted to. I thought about it, but—”
“It’s okay. I get it. Who is he? How did it happen?”
“His name’s Garrett Parker. He’s an IT consultant. He used to be one of the senior guys at Jumpp.”
“The social media software?”
She nodded. “We met at a bar in O’Hare. I was coming back here, he was going home to Seattle. We hit it off. Neither one of us was looking for someone, but I guess it happens when you least expect it. He moved in here with me a few weeks later. Earlier this month, we got married in Reno.”
“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.”
Her brow knitted. “Do you mean that?”
“I do.”
“Well, good. I hope you like him. I mean, he’s not you, Jason. I needed someone totally different after us. Can you understand that?”
“Of course.”
Abbey looked at her watch. “I should check on him. Make sure he’s okay. And then you need to tell him what’s going on.”
“I’ll come inside in a few minutes,” Bourne said. “I’ve got to reach out to Treadstone and get the cleaners en route. That will take a while. Once they arrive, they’ll be working here most of the night.”
“Okay.”
Bourne got up stiffly from the Audi. He felt the burn on his arm and neck from the garrote and knew he’d been lucky to survive. He hiked up the steep driveway toward the house with Abbey next to him, and then he made his way to the dead body on the sidewalk near the door. Kneeling next to Holtzman, he began rifling through the man’s pockets.
“What are you doing?” Abbey asked.
“I want to see if he’s carrying any clue about who hired him. It’s not likely, but you never know.”
He worked quickly. He found a Samsung phone in the man’s rear pocket, but it was locked, with a password requirement and no facial recognition. He’d have to turn it over to Treadstone and hope they could crack it. Holtzman had a wallet, and Jason found several hundred dollars in cash inside, plus a Visa credit card and a driver’s license with the Lomita address, rather than the condo in Long Beach. The IDs both used a different name, not Rod Holtzman.
When Bourne checked the killer’s other front pocket, he extracted several pieces of printer paper folded together. He separated them and found a series of articles taken from online magazines, blogs, and newspapers.
When he saw what the articles contained, his face darkened.
“Abbey,” he called to her sharply.
She was on her way inside the house, but she stopped and turned back. “What is it? Did you find something?”
Not saying a word, Bourne handed her the articles Holtzman had been carrying. A shadow immediately crossed her face, like his. The articles were all profiles—including photographs—of Garrett Parker, the programming whiz kid who jumped to Jumpp and then went out on his own. On one of the pages, the killer had written down an address in Malibu.
This address.
The address where Garrett was living with Abbey Laurent.
“I was wrong,” Bourne told her. “You weren’t the target. Your husband was.”