I’m always watching you.
Bourne guessed that Shadow had told him more than she intended. If she’d been watching him in DC, if she’d seen him with Johanna at the Hyatt, then she was still watching him in Los Angeles.
He slept in his hotel room at the Delphi until early afternoon, and after he was awake and showered, he searched the room and quickly located two Treadstone 4K cameras. One was in the hanging light over the desk—the obvious one, intended to make him believe there was no need to search further. The other was carefully hidden in the seam of the curtain. As he took it down, Bourne wondered how far Shadow’s obsession with him went and whether she was watching him right now as he got rid of her play toys.
In the hotel lobby, he saw that she also had human intelligence tracking him. A twentysomething Hollywood type—lavender suit, matching glasses—lounged underneath the hanging ferns. He noticed Bourne without seeming to notice him, and Jason saw his lips move as he whispered a radio report.
He’s heading out.
Bourne skipped his Highlander that was in a nearby garage. He assumed the SUV was bugged with more GPS devices than he was likely to find. Instead, he walked several blocks to Venice Boulevard, picking up two more tails along the way, then lost them as he crossed the street and hailed a cab in the opposite direction. He switched cabs twice more, and when he was convinced that no one from Treadstone was behind him, he finally took a cab to his true destination, which was MacArthur Park.
Johanna met him there.
They walked side by side next to the lake on Wilshire, in and out of the shadows of the palm trees. The sunshine sparkled, and the day was warm. Johanna took his hand, making them look like lovers. She wore a halter top and shorts over neon-yellow sneakers, and her blond hair was long and loose. Ray-Bans covered her eyes. He assumed she had her gun in the satchel purse slung over her shoulder, and the pouch was unzipped for easy access.
“How’s Abbey?” she asked.
“You know about her?”
“I still have sources inside Treadstone. I heard what happened.”
“Did you know her husband was the target?”
“I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. Callie Faith turned me on to Garrett as a source about data hacking. She called him in to testify before Congress about spyware after he took the job at Jumpp. So I did research on him. Imagine my surprise to find out he was shacking up with Abbey.”
“In other words, you were messing with me when you said you were spying on her. You were actually spying on him.”
Johanna shrugged. “I like messing with you. Seriously, is Abbey okay? Holtzman didn’t hurt her?”
“She’s fine.”
“White knight to the rescue.”
“Something like that.”
“Did she leave her husband and swoon in your arms?” Johanna asked.
“Not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“Well, as it happens, she asked if there was anyone in my life. I told her about you.”
“Really?” Johanna stopped on the sidewalk and whipped off her Ray-Bans. She was still holding his hand. “Really, you told Abbey about me?”
“I did. Obviously, I didn’t give her a name.”
“Huh.”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
They kept walking. As he examined the tourists around them and confirmed they weren’t under surveillance, Jason heard the song “MacArthur Park” in his head, and he had a strange vision of green icing melting along the curb.
“Shadow knows about us,” he said.
“She does? How?”
“She bugged my room at the Hyatt.”
Johanna shook her head. “So she got to hear the sex, huh? I’ll bet that turned her on. What did you say?”
“I said that I wanted your help. She’s okay with it. For now.”
“No kidding? Well, look at me, back on the Treadstone team. So what did you learn from Garrett Parker?”
“He thinks the data source for the Files involves some kind of interaction between Jumpp and third-party apps,” Bourne said. “Individually, the apps are harmless, but when someone uses both of them, the code goes rogue and starts feeding data to the cloud.”
“Interesting approach,” Johanna said. “If it’s Jumpp, then it must have originated with the Chinese.”
“Agreed.”
“As hacks go, they can do a lot of damage that way.”
“But?” Jason asked, hearing hesitation in her voice.
“But it doesn’t really get them what they want,” she continued.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, hacking huge amounts of data is like building yourself a haystack when what you really want is the needle. I mean, you might be able to troll a few obvious secrets, but it’s not like people put the really juicy stuff where you can readily find it. Do you think Rod Holtzman ever talked about being a hit man on any of his devices?”
“And yet whoever has the Files figured it out.”
“Exactly. That’s the problem. How?”
Johanna leaned on the concrete wall and stared at the lake. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he could see her IT mind putting the pieces together and trying to assemble the puzzle. Then she said out of nowhere, “Somebody leaves a cake out in the rain. Really? What the fuck is that about?”
“I was wondering that, too,” Bourne replied with a smile.
He was amused that the song was in her head, as it was in his, and something about her offhanded comment drew him in. The more time he spent with Johanna, the more he realized that he liked her. He didn’t trust her, but he liked her. A lot. The attraction between them was complicated, but very real.
She turned back to him. Her eyes were now bright with understanding, as if she’d cracked the code. “I think I know what we’re dealing with. It’s not the data that matters. The hack is secondary. That’s just the source material.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the software we really want. The Files are an AI engine. That’s what we’re looking for. You can grab all the data you want, but for it to mean anything, you need an engine to analyze it. The data is the car, but we want the motor that drives it.”
“Garrett figured there was an AI component. But how does that work?”
“Think about it. A data hack gives you an almost limitless supply of personal information for your haystack. But then you need the sophistication of AI to find the needles. Like Holtzman. Nothing in his data is going to point to him being an assassin, right? But aggregate enough info, and an AI engine can see patterns. People who were killed. Where they were killed. Who was nearby. Where they went, where they ate, who they talked to, where they filled up their cars, where their phones pinged, on and on and on. You or I wouldn’t spot those patterns in a thousand years. But AI can analyze all of it, and say, ‘Hey, you know what? I think this guy Rod Holtzman kills people for a living.’ ”
“And that’s what we’re looking for?” Bourne asked.
“Right. Throw the software on a high-end laptop and you’re good to go. The data stays in the cloud, while the engine does the heavy lifting. You can say, ‘Give me a hit man in Southern California,’ and oingo boingo, it finds Rod Holtzman. Or you can say, ‘What secret is Jason Bourne hiding that he doesn’t want me to find out?’ Let it crank, and a few minutes later, I know what you’re not telling me.”
Johanna winked, as if she wasn’t being serious. But Bourne knew she was.
He realized he had to be very careful with her. She was more than smart enough to ferret out his ulterior motive. He and Tati had both left tracks along the way, and with enough time and enough data, it wouldn’t take an AI engine to put them together at a Russian strongman’s ranch in Estonia. Johanna could do it on her own if she looked hard enough.
So could Shadow.
“So who do you think has the Files?” Bourne asked, ignoring her unspoken question.
“I have no idea.”
“Where do we look?”
Johanna tapped a finger on her pale pink lips. “Did Garrett mention Mr. Yuan?”
“He did. He said Mr. Yuan and his wife died in China.”
“Yes, everybody assumes the CCP eliminated them. But if the Files originated with a Chinese scheme, and it’s integrated with the coding on Jumpp, then it must have started with Mr. Yuan and his team. They were AI pioneers. They masterminded the hack and developed the AI engine to go along with it.”
“And then someone stole it?” Bourne asked.
“Could be.”
“But Mr. Yuan is dead. It wasn’t him.”
“Sure, but I’m betting someone on his team saw what happened to Mr. Yuan and figured they needed an insurance policy in case the Chinese came after them. When they had the Files in their hands, they also realized what kind of a moneymaker it could be.”
“Do you know who was on his team?” Bourne asked.
“I know who they are,” Johanna said. “Everybody in the AI world does. But they all went into hiding after Mr. Yuan disappeared. I communicated with one of them online when I was in Salzburg. His name’s Feng. I only knew him by his online avatar, but I was curious enough to go digging. I thought it might come in handy someday to know where he was.”
“Did you find him?”
Johanna looked offended. “Of course I found him. Feng’s in San Francisco. But we better move fast. If he’s kept an ear to the ground, he knows the Files are out there. Whether he took them or somebody else did, he knows people are going to come looking for him. He’ll have a target on his chest.”
*
Their flight landed at SFO in the early evening.
They took an Uber that dropped them at the intersection of Sacramento and Stockton in the heart of Chinatown. The pointed tower of the Transamerica Pyramid jutted out of the Financial District behind them. Johanna led him along a dark street that smelled of sesame and ginger, and she browsed the windows of jade boutiques and antique stores with a strange familiarity, as if she’d been here before. When she pulled him into a tiny, dimly lit Cantonese restaurant, the owner greeted her with a bow and a hug. She returned the favor with a kiss on his cheek.
They got a table at the far back. Johanna sat down with a kind of reverence, stroking the black lacquer with her palms, as if it were filled with memories. A photo on the wall showed a painting of Chinese mountains buried in mist, and she traced the outline of the frame. The owner brought black tea, and Johanna sipped it slowly, her eyes on Jason.
He waited for an explanation.
“I actually knew Feng pretty well,” she admitted finally. “This was our table. We came here a lot.”
“Tell me about him.”
Johanna studied the Chinese mountains again. Her voice was soft. “He was Mr. Yuan’s number two on the AI team. He and I clicked when we talked online, so I came here for a visit a couple of years ago. I ended up staying for four months.”
“You lived with him?”
“Does that bother you?”
“I’m just surprised.”
“Our brains were wired the same,” she said. “He was almost as smart as me. Almost. This was the early days of AI, you know? We spent hours talking about how it would all work, what the applications were, where we saw it going, what the dangers were. Feng was cool. We’d sit in his place coding for days with almost no breaks, just coming down here for tofu once in a while, sometimes hopping in the shower together. It was as close to a real relationship as I’d ever had in my life. At least until you. But Feng started keeping some of his breakthroughs from me. I realized I was doing the same thing, keeping new ideas from him. So we broke up. I went back to Salzburg.”
“Did Feng talk about Mr. Yuan and Jumpp? Did he ever give you any hints about the programming behind the Files?”
“Not a word. Once, I asked him about Mr. Yuan—I mean, the guy was a legend—but Feng shut it down. He was scared. He didn’t want the Chinese finding him or anyone else on the team.”
“Do you think Feng stole the AI engine?” Bourne asked.
“I doubt it. That’s not his style.”
“I’m surprised he wasn’t your first call when you tried to find the Files.”
“He was,” Johanna admitted. “I used my old contact data, but he went off the grid about six months ago. I haven’t been able to reach him. Or maybe he’s just ghosting me. The breakup wasn’t fun. Anyway, at that point, I had no particular reason to think the Files were connected to Jumpp. There are eighteen million hackers out there who could have been behind this. But with Holtzman going after Garrett Parker, that narrows it down. Mr. Yuan’s team is definitely high on the list.”
“So let’s talk to him,” Bourne said.
Johanna looked up as the restaurant owner brought them plates of mapo tofu, eggplant with garlic sauce, and sautéed bok choy. They hadn’t ordered anything, but apparently the man remembered Johanna’s tastes. She thanked him with an irresistible smile and stood up to give him another kiss on the cheek. When she sat down again, she grabbed a piece of tofu with her chopsticks and leaned over to put it in Jason’s mouth.
“First we eat,” she said. “Then we find Feng.”
They had dinner, and the Chinese food was authentic and delicious. Johanna looked relaxed, almost reverent, as if this place and this neighborhood were sacred to her. She opened up to him about her life, and the details bore no relationship to the story she’d invented when he first met her in Switzerland earlier in the year. She’d grown up outside Dallas, she said, which was where her parents still lived, although she hadn’t seen them in years. She’d been introverted. Shy. A prodigy at math and computers, but with no friends. Then, at age fourteen, her math teacher had sexually assaulted her, and after that, she ran away from Texas and never went back. But first, she admitted casually between bites of eggplant, she broke into the teacher’s house, tied him face down on his bed, and returned the favor with a toilet plunger.
Bourne remembered the warnings Shadow had given him about Storm. Her capacity for extreme violence and revenge. Her inability to shut down her emotions. Her unpredictable behavior and willingness to defy the mission because she thought she was smarter than everyone else. All of that was true. But Bourne saw many of the same traits in himself. That was part of the attraction between them.
He wondered whether Johanna was being honest about her past this time, or whether this latest story was another lie, another attempt to manipulate him. His stare locked onto this woman, who was so different from Abbey. And so attractive.
Who are you?
After dinner, they climbed the sharp slope of Sacramento Street under the wires of the electric trolley cars. Dozens of homeless people slept under blankets in the doorways, and ragged tents and oversized box shelters dotted the alleys. Half the parked cars on the street had their windows open so thieves wouldn’t smash them in the night. Some had handwritten signs taped to their windshields. Nothing to steal.
Feng lived three blocks away in a five-story Victorian apartment building on Powell. Cable car tracks lined the street, and the lights of the city made a line of fire down the hill that ended at the black water of the bay. Johanna still had a key to the building’s gated front door, and she let them inside. They took the stairs upward, guns in hand. Between the second and third floors, they had to squeeze sideways to allow a twentysomething Chinese kid to pass them on his way down the stairs. He had spiky black hair and red glasses, and he wore a baggy white T-shirt over khakis. The kid didn’t look at them; he was too busy playing a game on his phone.
They’d climbed to the next floor when Bourne stopped Johanna with a hand on her arm.
“What is it?” she asked.
Bourne frowned. “That kid on the stairs. I know him.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure.”
“All Asian people look alike to you?” Johanna asked with a smirk.
Jason winced at the joke. Then he closed his eyes. Think!
He did know that kid from somewhere. He’d seen him recently, just a passing glance. But it was him.
Or was Johanna right and his brain was blending Asian faces together?
He pictured the kid in his mind—the hair, the red glasses—and he had an impression of that same young man sitting down. Across a street. Behind a window. Jason remembered his eyes sweeping over him, registering who he was, but ignoring him because he didn’t seem to be a threat.
Where? Where was it?
Then, with a rush, his brain put the pieces together.
Jesus!
That same twentysomething kid had been sitting in a coffee shop across the street from Rod Holtzman’s condo in Long Beach. And now he was coming down the stairs from Feng’s apartment!
Bourne spun, his Glock still in his hand. Without a word to Johanna, he charged down the building stairs and out to the sidewalk on Powell Street. He looked both ways, seeing no one. The kid was already gone. But an instant later, gunfire erupted, shattering the windows on the ground-floor apartment and forcing Jason to throw himself to the ground. He isolated the source of the fire, between two parked cars halfway down the block. He waited until a passing taxi gave him cover, and then he scrambled to his feet and dashed across Powell.
Footsteps pounded. Ahead of him, the Chinese kid sprinted toward the base of the hill, his pace like the wind. Bourne fired and missed, and the kid fired backward over his shoulder, the bullet going high and wild. Jason followed, running downhill, watching the man dash diagonally across the street at Clay and disappear from view. He reached the intersection a few seconds later, but the kid had already vanished. Bourne listened, hearing nothing. The street was quiet, and he saw only the bright skyscrapers ahead of him, their towers capped by fog. He crossed carefully, staying low, but when he followed Clay all the way to the next street, he saw no more evidence of where the kid had gone.
He’d lost him.
Bourne retraced his steps to the apartment building and climbed to the top floor. The door to Feng’s apartment was open, the lights on. The one-bedroom unit smelled of sandalwood incense mixed with the acrid bite of gunpowder. Johanna sat in a lotus position on the worn yellow rug, her lips pushed together in a sad, tight frown, tears running down her face from her wide blue eyes.
Next to her was the body of a Chinese man in his thirties, sprawled on his back with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.