The marketers behind the word game DicTrace had licensed a cartoon image of Dick Tracy to go along with the app, but most of the players used a different name when talking about it online. The object of the game was to form the longest word possible out of a large scramble of letters, and so most people called it Dick Race. In one of the strange viral lightning bolts of the online world, it had grown from obscurity to become the number one game app two years earlier, with millions of people posting their longest words on their social media accounts.
Like Jumpp.
In the process, Bourne realized, they’d unknowingly opened up their computers and their lives to the Files.
He looked across the rooftop bar and restaurant called West at the top of the Hotel Angeleno. It was near sunset. On the far side of the cylindrical tower, at a window table overlooking the traffic of the 405, he spotted the man he was looking for, the man he’d been investigating all day. Martin Lee was the founder and CEO of DicTrace and still its principal owner. The man sat by himself, scrolling through his phone and nibbling on an order of togarashi spiced tuna. He had a pink cocktail with a sugared rim in front of him.
Bourne made his way around the border of the restaurant beside the tall windows. When he passed the CEO’s table, he stopped as if in surprise and whipped off his sunglasses. “Martin? Martin Lee? It’s Charlie Briggs, Colby Lake Capital, Manhattan. Good to see you again. We met in the Nassau yacht harbor last winter.”
Martin glanced up at him with no expression on his face. He was a slim Chinese man of about forty, with thinning hair and gold earrings in both ears. He wore a flowered silk Hawaiian shirt and ripped blue jeans, plus crocodile cowboy boots. No one would have guessed that he was worth a billion dollars. He took another sip of his drink and a bite of his tuna appetizer before replying. When he did, his voice was soft but direct.
“First of all, we’ve never met, Mr. Briggs. I remember everyone I meet. Second, I’m in no need of investment capital for my business, and I’m not interested in pitches for investing in other enterprises. Third, I don’t appreciate my happy hour being interrupted. This is the only break I allow myself in my fourteen-hour days. So please excuse me.”
“Oh, you’ll want to hear what I have to say,” Bourne told him with a wide smile. He sat down uninvited in the chair opposite the CEO.
“That’s doubtful,” Martin replied. “Do I need to ask the manager to have you removed?”
Bourne speared a piece of togarashi tuna with a fork. “This tuna is good. Excellent. I see why you come here every day. In fact, you spend exactly sixty minutes here while your driver waits for you in the Tesla Model Y downstairs. He carries a Ruger LC9, and he reads graphic novels while you’re at your happy hour. That fruity pink drink isn’t on the menu, but it’s your favorite cocktail from your college days in Beijing. The bartender makes it special and has it waiting for you as soon as you arrive. You’re a man of predictable habits, Martin. For someone with your resources, that’s unwise.”
Martin tapped a finger slowly on the table as he sized up Bourne with newfound curiosity. “Well. How interesting. You know a lot about me, Mr. Briggs. Congratulations on your research. Then again, most investment bankers are good at that. Know your enemy, I believe they say. Are you my enemy, Mr. Briggs?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how the next five minutes of our conversation go.”
Martin took another sip of his drink, then calmly licked his lips. “This isn’t about money, is it?”
“No.”
“And your name isn’t Briggs.”
“No, it’s not.”
“So what do you want, Mr. Briggs?” Martin asked, returning to his phone as if Bourne were nothing but a distraction.
“I need information about one of your employees.”
“Talk to my HR department,” the man replied. “I don’t know the ins and outs of our personnel files.”
“You know this person,” Bourne said.
A hint of nervousness broke across Martin’s face, but he covered it by dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.
“I’d like you to leave, Mr. Briggs. We’re done here. If you want information about someone on my team, I’m sure you can do research on them the way you did your research on me. Now, as I told you, I’m a very busy man. I have work to do.”
Bourne leaned forward, giving the man another hard smile. “Didn’t anyone tell you that working too hard will kill you, Martin? Then again, so will the Glock I have pointed between your legs. Well, the first shot may not actually kill you. But trust me, you won’t be winning any Dick Races after that.”
Martin glanced at Jason’s right arm, which had disappeared under the table. Bourne tapped the man’s knee with the barrel of his gun, and the CEO’s eye twitched with concern. “Who are you?”
“Who I am doesn’t matter. The point is what I want.”
“And what’s that?”
“Vix.”
Martin’s face showed no surprise. “Vix. Of course. Well, join the club, Mr. Briggs. Everyone wants her. But I have no idea where she is.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“What you choose to believe isn’t my concern. Vix disappeared almost a year ago. I haven’t seen her since then.”
Bourne assessed the man and concluded he was telling the truth. At least about Vix. “Who else has been looking for her? Did the Chinese come calling?”
“I have nothing to say about that.”
“Well, you better start talking. Now.” He racked the slide on the Glock with a loud click that the CEO could hear.
“If I tell you anything, they will kill me.”
“And if you don’t, I will. I’m here, Martin. They’re not. So let’s try this again. Are the Chinese looking for Vix?”
Martin glanced around the restaurant, as if hoping for rescue or escape, but no one was coming to help him. “All right. Yes. I told you, she stopped showing up for work. A few days later, two men came to see me. Men like you. I told them what I’m telling you. I have no idea where Vix went or where she is.”
“But you do know why they’re looking for her,” Bourne said.
The man’s voice was clipped. “Vix is a thief.”
“In other words, she has something the Chinese desperately want to get back. She’s the one who stole the Files.”
Martin said nothing, but his silence told Bourne everything.
“Did you know who Vix was when you hired her?” Bourne asked. “Did you know she was Mr. Yuan’s daughter?”
Again, no surprise.
“I didn’t. Not at first. Not when I brought her into the company. It was only after she disappeared that they told me. They didn’t know at first, either. She fooled all of us. Mr. Yuan set her up with a false identity when he brought her to the U.S., and none of us had any idea. He wanted her close to him. Someone he could trust. I think he knew we would turn on him eventually.”
“How did it all work? The Files. How did the plan get put into place?” When Martin hesitated, Bourne used his fork to take another bite of tuna, then placed the fork sharply against the vein on the back of the CEO’s hand.
“You’re about to lose the use of two of your fingers for the rest of your life.”
Martin kept his face like stone, but he hissed in agony. “All right! Stop!”
Bourne removed the fork, and the man massaged the feeling back into his hand.
“The CCP were planning it for years,” he said. “It started out as simply a data-hacking operation. After they breached the OPM in 2015, they were looking for ways to expand their reach. People outside government. Business, media, science. That was how Jumpp came into play. Just like TikTok, it was supposed to be a harmless social media operation that would plant spyware and manipulate American users. But Mr. Yuan saw potential beyond gathering the data itself. He was one of the original brains behind AI. As the technology grew more sophisticated, he realized the data could be mined by AI to reveal other, much more explosive secrets. That was the vision behind the Files. But they didn’t want to rely exclusively on the coding for Jumpp to put it in motion. It would be too easy to discover, expose, thwart. So they created synergies between Jumpp and other apps.”
“Like yours,” Bourne said.
Martin nodded. “Yes. Like mine. Five years ago, I had the work done on the game, but I had no start-up capital to expand. A Chinese businessman came to me and said he wanted to help me with funding. I knew who he represented. I wasn’t stupid, I recognized the hand of the government. But there was no way I could say no. So they became my silent partners. That meant giving them access to my code. Behind the scenes, Mr. Yuan and his team built a separate infrastructure, hidden away, under their exclusive control. They maintained it. I never even saw it. I had no idea what it was doing.”
“So you knew Mr. Yuan?”
“Of course.”
“Why was he killed? Why did they eliminate him and his team?”
“He began to raise doubts about the project and what it was doing. He saw how they planned to manipulate people. He opened his mouth. He protested. The fool! How could he think they would sit there and do nothing? So they took him out. They killed him and his wife when he went home for vacation. After that, the members of his team ran, but the Chinese tracked them down one by one.”
“And Vix?”
Martin shook his head. “I told you, I had no idea who she was. She left Jumpp. I don’t know why. Maybe she thought people there were getting suspicious of her. But she came here, and I assumed she was CCP. A plant to spy on me and my operations. I installed her in a separate division, but I got reports that she was hacking our code. Pawing around in the hidden systems. I didn’t raise any red flags because I assumed she was working for them.”
“She wasn’t,” Bourne said.
“No. She was trying to figure out how the whole system worked. How the data was hacked and stored. And most of all, how the AI engine integrated everything. It turned out that her goal was—”
“To steal it.”
Martin finished the rest of his pink drink in a single swallow. “Yes. A year ago, she disappeared. So did her younger sister over in Shanghai. They must have coordinated it together. Vix obviously knew the CCP would use her sister as leverage as soon as they discovered what she’d done. She put her plan in motion over a weekend. I don’t know what her motive was. Money. Revenge for her parents. Power. Maybe all three. But she relocated the cloud data to another server farm. We have no idea where. She downloaded the AI engine onto a laptop, and then she fed a virus into our systems to destroy it all behind her. After that, she vanished.”
“With the Files.”
Martin nodded. “With the Files. Wherever she is, Vix has them. And from what I hear on the street, she’s using them.”
*
Vix’s last-known address was in Japantown, not Chinatown. It was a place where Chinese agents were unlikely to find anyone to act as spies.
Bourne made his way after nightfall to an apartment building on San Pedro Street in the heart of L.A.’s Little Tokyo. The street was quiet, the shops and restaurants all closed, but he eyed the windows around him to see if there was any obvious surveillance. Then he picked the lock on the building door and took the elevator to the top floor, where he let himself inside Vix’s one-bedroom condo.
He didn’t really expect to find anything, and he didn’t. Whatever Vix had left behind when she ran was already gone. The apartment was empty. The furniture had been taken away, the closets and cabinets stripped. He didn’t find so much as a scrap of paper or a package of frozen peas in the refrigerator that the Chinese had missed. The place had been thoroughly searched and sanitized. Even the walls had been opened up and checked, and then the drywall replaced and the entire condo repainted.
They’d left nothing for anyone else to find.
Except one thing.
When Bourne went into the bedroom, he knew he’d made a mistake. A green light immediately blinked on from a device mounted near the ceiling. A camera. The Chinese may have taken everything out, but they hadn’t left. They were still watching the condo to see if Vix came back.
He spun around and charged for the apartment door, but before he made it halfway across the empty carpet, a man appeared in the doorway. He was Chinese, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He wore red glasses and had spiky black hair, and he had a gold iPhone jutting out of the front pocket of his jeans.
Bourne had already seen him twice before.
Once at a café across from Rod Holtzman’s building.
Once on the steps coming down from Feng’s hideaway in San Francisco.
The killer pointed a Chinese-made QSZ-92 pistol at Bourne’s chest. He kicked the condo door shut behind him with his heel, and he stepped closer, keeping a secure distance that was too far for Bourne to leap at him without taking a bullet.
“It’s Cain, isn’t it?” the man said.
Bourne shrugged and said nothing.
“I heard Treadstone was on the hunt for the Files,” the assassin went on. “I figured it wouldn’t be long until you made the connection to Vix and came looking for her. But I’m afraid for you, the hunt ends here.”
“Killing me won’t stop Treadstone,” Bourne said.
“It’ll slow them down. That’s all we need. A few more days, and we’ll have the Files back in our hands.”
“How? Where’s Vix?”
The kid smiled and didn’t answer. “Get on your knees, Cain.”
“I don’t think so.”
Never let your enemy know you want the same thing.
Treadstone.
“Get on your knees, or you won’t have any knees. I have no instructions about whether to make it hard or soft for you, Cain. It’s my choice. If you resist, that makes the decision easier.”
“We’re both professionals,” Bourne said. “It’s kill or be killed.”
“That’s right.”
“Or we could help each other.”
“We don’t need your help. We simply need you out of the way.”
“Vix is clever,” Bourne told him. “She’s Mr. Yuan’s daughter. Don’t be so sure she won’t outsmart you.”
“Enough stalling, Cain. Get on your knees.”
Bourne stayed where he was. “Do you know why Vix is trying to kill Garrett Parker?”
Momentary suspicion flashed across the kid’s face.
“You don’t, do you?” Jason went on, because he knew the killer was wondering the same thing. “Don’t you think you should figure that out before you try to take her down? Why is she so intent on getting rid of him when she’s in the midst of selling the Files? Fifty million dollars, right? That’s the price. For that kind of money, she could hire another hit man to replace Rod Holtzman and keep her hands clean.”
“What do you know about Garrett Parker?” the kid asked.
“Put down the gun. Let’s talk. I help you, you help me.”
“Or you tell me what you know and I make it quick. Otherwise, you beg me to end it while you’re screaming to Jesus.” The killer lowered the gun to point the barrel at Bourne’s left knee. “Last warning.”
Bourne spread his arms out, his fingers wide. Slowly, he lowered himself to the carpet, one knee down, then the other. Without being asked, he laced his fingers behind his head, hoping the kid wouldn’t notice, that he would think it was automatic. That’s what you do when you’ve lost the game and you’re out of options. You go to your knees, and you put your hands behind your head.
Right above the neck sheath that held his dagger.
He needed a distraction. Just one tiny break in the killer’s concentration. The kid slipped a finger over the trigger of the gun—but Bourne didn’t look at him and didn’t look at the pistol. Instead, his eyes drifted to the door, and a tiny smile crept along the corner of his lips. That was all it took. The kid hesitated; he lost focus for a fraction of a second. By the time he began firing, Bourne was already moving as a bullet burned past his head. His right hand grabbed for the knife handle in the sheath, and as he threw himself sideways, he whipped his forearm forward, hurling the knife at the killer. He aimed for his throat, but his aim was off, and the blade came in low and hard, landing up to the hilt below the kid’s collarbone.
The killer jerked but absorbed the impact. He tracked Bourne, who rolled away, and the kid fired twice more as Jason yanked his Glock from the rear of his back. A bullet blew into the wall near his shoulder and threw up dust; another scored his neck, drawing blood. Jason flinched, ducked, and fired back, but the killer was already gone, tumbling to a new position near the apartment door. He came up firing, but the blade had severed his shoulder muscles, leaving his aim wild. Bourne fired on the run, but he missed, too.
For an instant between shots, their eyes met, their guns both ready.
The killer made a calculation that killers make. He wasn’t going to win. Instead, he spun through the condo door. Bourne heard the crash bar of the stairwell door on the other side of the hallway, and he took off after him. The stairwell door hadn’t closed as he slammed through it. He spotted the kid halfway down the first set of stairs, and he threw himself forward, his body landing on the killer’s back and crashing them both to the concrete landing at the base of the steps. They hit hard; both of their guns went flying.
Bourne wound up on top.
He yanked out the blade of his knife and shoved it back in, up to the hilt again. This time the kid screamed.
“Where’s Vix?”
“Fuck you,” he hissed.
Blade out, blade in. Another squirt of blood and a howl of agony. Bourne leaned in, their faces inches apart.
“Where is she?”
The kid’s breathing came fast. He clenched his teeth against the pain. “Kill me. I’m not telling you a fucking thing.”
“Tell me, and I let you live.”
“Liar!”
The killer slammed his skull forward, bone against bone. The impact dizzied Bourne for an instant, and the kid shoved against his body hard. Jason’s hand was still clenched around the knife handle, and the blade came free as the killer squirmed away. As his brain righted itself, he saw his Glock, and he scooped it into his hand and spun, ready to fire.
But he had no shot. The assassin was gone. Far below him, footsteps pounded down the stairs for the street.