25

“Vix.”

Garrett got up from the sofa in the Malibu house and wandered to the wet bar. He poured vodka into a shot glass. He downed it ­before Abbey could object, and then he returned to the sofa and sat next to her. Other than the bandage that covered part of his skull, he looked healthy. The color had returned to his skin, and he showed no signs of dizziness or distress when he walked. He put a hand on Abbey’s thigh, and somehow Bourne thought the gesture was deliberate.

She’s mine now. Not yours.

“Are you sure?” Garrett went on. “I haven’t seen or heard from Vix in months. Yeah, she was unstable, but our relationship was a long time ago. I don’t understand why she’d be coming after me now.”

“Martin Lee from DicTrace confirmed it,” Bourne said. “Vix stole the Files. She hijacked the AI engine behind the hack.”

“And you think she’s the one who’s been trying to kill me?”

“It looks that way.”

“Jesus.” Garrett shook his head. He looked genuinely stunned, in a way that Bourne didn’t think could be faked. “That makes no sense. You have to be wrong. I mean, okay, if Vix has the Files, fine. I can believe that. But why come after me?”

“Lana Moreno says Vix was making threats after you broke up. Did you know that?”

“Sure. Lana tried to protect me, but I knew. Vix was crazy. Brilliant, but off the deep end. But like I told you, that was months ago. We’ve had no contact since then. I don’t think she’d be coming after me now.”

“Well, she is. You need to wrap your head around that. For some reason, you are as important to her as selling the Files. I’d like to know why.”

“Even if it’s true, I don’t see how it helps you find her.”

“It helps me get inside her head,” Bourne replied. “I can figure out her strengths and weaknesses, and I can try to guess what she’ll do next. Plus, it’s a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like that. Crazy or not, everything Vix has done up to now reflects a smart, calculated plan. Coming after you is part of that plan, and I don’t think it’s just obsession from a jilted lover.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I still think you’re wrong.”

Bourne shifted his attention to Abbey, who was holding Garrett’s hand as they sat next to each other. She looked at Jason, then looked away, with a flush that reflected the awkwardness between them. He wanted to be out of her life, and he kept coming back. He wanted to let her go, and circumstances kept reeling him in. Their relationship was over. But before he could walk away, he had to do something he was reluctant to do. He had to show her that her husband was lying.

Because Garrett was definitely lying.

“What are you hiding, Garrett?” Bourne asked sharply. “What are you not telling me? What are you not telling your wife? Because I think you know what’s going on. You know exactly why Vix is coming after you.”

The younger man’s lip curled with anger. “Is this really about me, Bourne? Or are you just trying to turn Abbey against me?”

Jason tried to hide the contempt he felt for this man, but he failed. “Honestly? I don’t care about you at all, Garrett. I do care about Abbey. As long as you’re in the crosshairs, so is she. I only want two things out of this mission. I want to find the Files. And I want to keep Abbey safe. I really don’t give a shit what Vix does to you.”

“Jason,” Abbey murmured, her voice chiding him. But he could see in her eyes that he was getting through to her. She turned to Garrett and said, “Is he right? Is there something more that you’re not telling us?”

Garrett got up and stormed to the patio door and stared out at the California hills. “You too? Goddamn it, Abbey!”

“I know you’re hiding things,” Bourne went on. “I know you’re lying. I’m not just guessing. Lana told me about mygirlnextdoor. You consulted on the code, but you told me you had nothing to do with the site. Why?”

“You think I wanted Abbey to know I was involved with a ­high-​­end escort site? I had a limited freelance role, and it was years ago. It had nothing to do with the Files.”

“Mygirlnextdoor has everything to do with the Files. It’s part of the whole scheme.”

“Well, I didn’t know anything about that.”

“Of course you knew,” Bourne insisted. “You’re an AI genius. There’s no way you didn’t spot problems with the code immediately. Even if you didn’t know the endgame, you knew there was spyware at the heart of it. Is that why you went to Jumpp? Is that why you showed up at that conference and talked your way into a job? You wanted to figure out how the scheme worked.”

Garrett’s fists clenched. “You need to go. I want you out of here.”

“Not until I get answers.”

Garrett turned to Abbey, his voice harsh. “Get rid of him!”

She stared back, not with a wife’s face, but with a reporter’s face. “First I think you should answer his questions, Garrett.”

“There’s nothing to say. This is all bullshit!”

Bourne played his last card, and he hoped it was an ace. “Did you know that Vix was Mr. Yuan’s daughter?”

Garrett didn’t react. He didn’t move; he didn’t say anything; his face showed nothing. Abbey hissed with shock, but Garrett stood by the door like a block of ice. The lack of reaction told Bourne everything.

“So you did know,” he said.

After a long silence, Garrett finally replied. “Yes.”

“She told you?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“During our relationship.”

“Strange that you didn’t mention that,” Bourne said.

Garrett went back and sat down next to Abbey, but as soon as he did, Abbey got up and walked away from him.

“Who did you tell?” Bourne asked.

“No one. I told no one. Even after we broke up, I kept her secret.”

“Then why is she trying to kill you?” Bourne asked.

Garrett said nothing, and Abbey broke in from across the room. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re hiding, Garrett, but you need to tell him. You need to tell me. What have I gotten myself into by being with you?”

Her husband sighed. “It’s possible Vix may blame me for the death of her parents.”

“That was the Chinese,” Bourne said.

“Yes, the CCP killed them, but it’s more complicated than that.”

“Then you better explain.”

“If I do that, then your people will kill me,” Garrett said.

“My people?”

“Treadstone.”

By the glass doors, Abbey let an expletive burst from her throat. “Fuck!”

“How do you know about Treadstone?” Bourne demanded, emphasizing each word.

Garrett took a deep breath. “It all started with mygirlnextdoor. Just like you said. This was during my old job. Before Jumpp. I didn’t write the code for the app. I just consulted on AI integration and where I thought the technology was going. Even back then, it was pretty obvious to me that soon you’d have completely artificial girls on these sites, interacting with clients using chatbots. So I was advising on ways they could be ready for the transition.”

“And?”

“And I noticed some weird shit. Routines that didn’t make any sense, sections of code that went nowhere. They seemed to have external references, like they’d be controlled from outside the app. I talked to the developers, and they got really squirrelly about it. Turns out the whole app was being run from overseas. They wouldn’t tell me where or how the code was supposed to work.”

“What did you do?” Bourne asked.

“I posted about it on an AI forum. I wanted to see if anyone else had noticed shit like this on other sites. Next thing I know, my post gets deleted. Scrubbed. A week after that, a car pulls up next to me near Pike Place Market. This ­guy—​­a guy like ­you—​­says there’s somebody who wants to meet me. A woman. She’s part of a government agency, and she wants to talk about my post.”

A woman.

Bourne knew what was coming. He could see it from a mile away.

“I figured we’d go to the downtown federal building, but we didn’t,” Garrett continued. “We went to the airport. An unmarked jet was waiting, and they flew me all the way to DC. But I didn’t even get off the plane. Instead, this woman came on board to meet me. Blond, attractive, but not the kind you mess with, you know? She didn’t even give me her name. She just said she was ­called—­”

“Shadow,” Bourne said.

Garrett stared at him. “Yeah. That’s right. Shadow. She tells me she’s part of an agency called Treadstone. Intelligence. National security. And she wants to know more about what I spotted inside this app. So I told her. I said it looked to me like the app was vulnerable. Deliberately vulnerable. With the right triggers, it could be used to hack into the personal data of the players.”

“Then what?”

“She told me her team had the same concerns. They were worried about Chinese spyware and the kind of information hacking that could be done via apps and big social media platforms. One of them was Jumpp. I was from Seattle, and Jumpp was based in Seattle, so she asked if I’d be willing to work my way into the organization and find out what I could about their coding. They knew my reputation in the AI community. They figured I’d be taken seriously.”

“This was while Mr. Yuan and his team were still there?” Bourne asked.

“Yeah. I knew of him. Everybody did. This ­woman—​­Shadow—​­said they didn’t have any specific evidence that Jumpp was using spyware. But given that it was a Chinese operation, they wanted intel from the inside.”

“So you did it.”

“I did. I went to talk to Mr. Yuan. I tried to get him to hire me. I said he seemed to be doing ­cutting-​­edge AI applications, and that’s what I wanted, too. We met two or three times. We spoke the same language, you know? We talked about trends. He didn’t say anything about what was going on at Jumpp, nothing about spyware or hacking, nothing about AI engines to parse user data. That’s what I reported to Shadow. I figured that was the end of it.”

“So what happened?” Bourne asked.

“Two weeks later, Mr. Yuan quit. A month after that, he and his wife were killed. After that happened, Shadow came after me again. She encouraged me to go to the conference in Washington and try to get the people at Jumpp to hire me. They did.”

“Not long after that, you testified before Congress that you saw no evidence of spyware in Jumpp’s code,” Bourne said.

“That was the truth. I didn’t see anything. I had no idea what was really going on until I saw how DicTrace and Jumpp seemed to interact. ­Except—​­I wasn’t the one who spotted it. Vix did. When she started working there, she saw what was going on, and she told me about it. We were still involved at that point.”

“Did you tell Shadow?”

Garrett hesitated. “Yes.”

Bourne shook his head. More lies from Treadstone.

Shadow had known about Jumpp from the beginning. She’d sent him on a hunt where she already knew where the evidence would take him.

“Why would Vix blame you for the death of her parents?” Bourne asked. “Martin Lee told me that Mr. Yuan had begun to question the uses for his code. He was having a crisis of conscience. That’s when the Chinese pulled him out.”

“Yes, but there was more to it than that,” Garrett said. “He was also set up.”

“Set up how?”

But Bourne saw the same invisible hand he always saw.

“Shadow,” Garrett replied. “She leaked rumors to the Chinese that Mr. Yuan had been meeting with an American intelligence agent. Namely me, although I wasn’t identified. The Chinese thought he’d been handing over secrets to the U.S. government about their hacking operation, and that’s why they had him killed. Treadstone thought Mr. Yuan was a security threat, and they wanted him removed with no fingerprints coming back to them. They got what they wanted.”

“They always do,” Bourne said. “But if your identity was never revealed, how did Vix know you were a spy?”

Garrett shrugged. “How do you think? She ran me through the Files.”

*

The woman did tai chi on the Pacific sand.

Every motion brought her body and mind together. It was so simple and yet so profoundly complicated. The exercises forced her to purge her brain of unwanted thoughts, to remove all distractions, to focus on the now. Her muscles worked as one, patient and fluid, like a ­slow-​­moving river through the forest. Her breath went in and out, and her heart slowed until she could hear its individual beats.

She didn’t hear the ocean, but the waves rolled inside her like steady thunder.

She didn’t feel the sun, but its rays warmed her from within.

She didn’t hear the children on the beach, but their laughter connected her with her own inner child.

She went back to the past. To her earliest days of peace and joy. Inside her mind, this was more than just a memory. She literally traveled back to the gardens of Zhongshan Park in Shanghai and took strength from the presence of her family. They steeled her for the work that lay ahead. They instilled courage in her soul.

When her daily ritual was done, she turned her focus back to the house on the hill above her. The house where Garrett Parker lived.

All virtue was rewarded, all vice was punished.

Soon he would pay for his crimes.