Bourne abandoned the taxi at the side street he’d chosen near Les Halles and then walked a few blocks to the plaza in front of the Hôtel de Ville. It was after midnight, but hundreds of lights gave the palace-like city hall a yellow glow. So did the bonfires in the plaza, dozens of empty oil drums filled with wood and set ablaze by supporters of La Vraie. Their angry chants bellowed into the night, calling for a new revolution and repeating the name of Le Roi Raymond. Most carried French flags, along with posters bearing the photograph of Raymond Berland, his fist raised in a power salute.
Jason found an empty bench and slid his phone from his pocket.
First he reviewed the message from Vandal. Chouat’s secretary had been murdered, the lawyer’s office ransacked. If there had been evidence about Monika left behind, it was gone. That meant his last chance to reach her was the phone number Chouat had given him.
Twelve digits, one UK number.
All he needed to do was send a message.
We need to meet, he typed. It’s David.
Then he erased the message without sending it. First he needed to talk to Johanna. She was supposed to be here with him, and she was late. He opened the messaging app again, and he sent a message to the burner phone he’d given her. Are you okay?
“I’m fine,” said a voice behind him.
Johanna slid onto the bench, with the lights of the Hôtel de Ville glowing behind her. Her face was flushed from the heat of the fires, but she kissed him and stayed close, their thighs pressed together. They’d only been apart for a day, but he felt her absence, and he was glad to be back in the aura of her perfume.
“Sorry,” she said. “The Métro is a fucking disaster with all the rioters and police. What’s going on?”
He gave her an update on what had happened during the evening, and he ended with the UK phone number.
Johanna shivered despite the heat in the plaza. “Jesus. Do you think that’s really Monika’s number? After all this time? We finally have a way to reach her?”
“We have a way to reach someone. It may be her, it may not.”
“Did you text the number?”
“No. I wanted you with me before I did.”
Her forehead wrinkled with confusion, but then she understood. “You mean, to help you figure out whether it’s really her?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think she’ll answer?”
“If it’s a trap, if it’s not her, she’ll answer and try to lure us in,” Bourne said. “And if it is her? She may answer, or she may simply run. But right now, this is as close as we’ve come to finding her.”
He tapped in the same message he’d already deleted once before.
We need to meet. It’s David.
This time he sent it and watched as the text was delivered.
“Now we wait,” he told Johanna. “We’ll need to be patient. If we hear anything back at all, it might not be until tomorrow.”
But he was wrong.
Not even a minute after he sent the message, the phone buzzed with a reply.
David, it’s me.
Johanna expelled her breath loudly. “Oh my God!”
“Hang on,” he murmured. “We don’t know who’s talking to us.”
Where are you? he wrote back.
A few seconds later, another text arrived. Paris.
“She’s here!” Johanna exclaimed.
“Someone’s here. It may be her, it may not.”
I got your note at the hotel, he typed.
Then you know I don’t want you to find me. Leave me alone, David. Go back to your life. Let me go back to mine.
We’re both in danger, he wrote.
You put me in danger once before.
Yes, I did. I’m sorry.
I’m safer without you, David.
I know why you feel that way, but this is different. We need to talk. In person.
A long pause followed. Then a new text arrived. That’s a bad idea.
And yet you’re here. You came to Paris. Why?
Because I know you. You wouldn’t give up, you wouldn’t stop searching unless you heard from me. So I came here to send you a message. But now I’m telling you to go.
“We need some way to confirm it’s really her,” Bourne said. “I need to ask her something only she would know.”
Johanna bit her lip in thought. “She’s got a tattoo of a rose on her ass.”
“No, it can’t be anything physical,” Bourne said. “If someone has Monika—or even if they had her and killed her—they can identify anything we ask about her body. They’ll have taken pictures of her, too, in case we ask for a photo. That won’t tell us anything.”
“But if they have her, won’t they just force her to answer our questions?”
“If she’s being held against her will, then I hope she’s smart enough to lie.”
“Well, what about where you asked her to marry you? Mont Saint-Michel. That’s not the kind of thing someone else is likely to know.”
Jason didn’t want to ask that question or go down that road, but he did anyway. He wrote: Years ago, we got engaged.
Yes, we did.
Where did I ask you?
He held his breath, waiting for the reply. It seemed to take longer than he expected, but that may have been his own anxiety.
Finally, she wrote back.
Mont Saint-Michel. Another text arrived a couple of seconds later: It really is me, David.
“Oh my God!” Johanna said.
He read the words again: It really is me.
But was it?
Could someone else know the answer to that question? Could he have told someone about Monika and Mont Saint-Michel himself sometime in the past? Because he remembered none of it.
“Give me another question,” he said quickly to Johanna. “Something personal, something even I wouldn’t know about. Just you and her.”
Johanna cupped her palms over her face. “I don’t know—there’s so much—wait, wait, our father had a favorite movie. He used to watch it all the time. It was a Hitchcock film. The Cary Grant one. North by Northwest.”
What’s your father’s favorite movie? Bourne texted.
This time there was another long pause from the other phone.
How do you know about that, David?
You told me.
Another pause.
No. I didn’t.
What was it? I need to know it’s you.
Again she took a long time to answer, so long he wondered if she was going to stop responding at all.
Then the message came through.
North by Northwest.
Next to him, Johanna exhaled loudly.
It was her. It was Monika.
Jason felt the roaring he always felt in his head as memories fought to come back and bumped hard into a wall of nothingness. His brain grasped to remember this woman. He’d loved her. He’d wanted to spend his whole life with her. But then his life had changed overnight. He became Treadstone. He became Cain. From that moment forward, there was no turning back.
The man who’d once been David Webb disappeared into the mist.
He needed so many answers. This woman had been there at the crossroads of his whole life, and he didn’t know her at all. The only thing he had was an old photograph of her from the Drei Alpenhäuser. He ignored Johanna, who was clutching tightly to his shoulder, and his fingers tapped urgently on the keys.
Why did you run, Monika? I took you to Hamburg, but you left and didn’t tell me where you were going.
He watched the screen and saw that she was typing a reply.
After what happened, do you really need to ask? Can you blame me? I thought I was going to die in that chalet. I was terrified, David. Not just of them. Of you. You weren’t the man I thought I knew.
I never meant for you to be involved in that.
Does that change anything? They terrorized me. So did you. I thought you were going to kill me.
I would never do that. I can’t believe you would think that.
The man I loved would never do that, but you weren’t that man anymore.
Yes, I know.
And later, when we were free, you said I had to leave my whole life behind. Leave you behind.
It was necessary. It was the only way to keep you safe.
Well, I did what you wanted. I left you behind. I left everything behind. I ran. I didn’t trust you anymore.
And yet you kept the back door going. All this time. The signal. The hotel. Why?
She didn’t answer right away. He thought she might have quit the conversation entirely, but the phone told him she was still crafting a reply.
I couldn’t shut you out entirely. Not after what we’d meant to each other.
Jason frowned as he read the answer. Johanna picked up on his emotions.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s lying.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s saying what she thinks I want to hear, but it feels false. Like her answers have been rehearsed.”
“Is it not her? But she knows things only Monika would know.”
“It may be her, it may be your sister, but you have to remember what I told you. Monika may not have been the person either of us thought she was. She was keeping secrets back then. She still is.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have to meet her,” Bourne said.
He tapped out another text.
I need to see you. Now. Tonight. Name a place and time.
“Will she do it?” Johanna asked.
“I think she will,” he replied. “I’ve peeled back every layer of her identity, and that’s the only one left. Whatever’s going on between us, it will only be resolved face-to-face.”
He didn’t have to wait long to be proved right. His phone buzzed.
La Villette. The dome. One hour.