Jason had no time to process the implications of what he’d found. Through the drafty walls of the attic, he heard cracks of gunfire outside the cottage. Le Renouveau was on the hunt. He grabbed an Astra StG4 rifle from Monika’s arsenal, then jumped down the ladder to the floor of the bedroom closet. Reaching up, he let Johanna slide into his arms.
“Stay in the house,” he told her. “I have to go.”
“What? No! I’m coming with you.”
“Not now. Not into a firefight.” He turned to Vandal, who was waiting in the bedroom doorway. “You stay here, too. They may make a move on the cottage if they don’t realize Monika is already gone. Take cover up in the attic if you need to, and blast anyone who comes up the stairs.”
Vandal stared at him coldly. “What do you think you’re doing, Cain? You can’t take them on alone.”
“Do I have a choice? Look at you. You can barely stand up, Vandal. Your vision keeps blurring, and you’ve got a headache like a spike through your skull. Right? You’re no help to me that way.”
She said nothing, which told him everything.
“Stay here,” he repeated. But as he left, he suddenly reached out and grabbed her by the neck with one hand. His voice was harsh, like the burnt ash of a thousand lies. “Tell me one thing first. Did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Don’t play games with me. Did you know Monika is Treadstone?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. I didn’t, Cain, I swear. I guessed it when I saw what she has upstairs, but that was the first time I even suspected. Nash didn’t tell me. He kept me in the dark as much as you.”
“Does Nash know I’m here?” Jason asked.
He tightened his grip on her neck.
“Did you tell him I was coming to the island?” he asked again.
Vandal struggled to take a breath. “Yes.”
“Fuck!”
Bourne wrapped his other hand around Vandal’s throat and pushed in his thumbs against her windpipe. The other agent didn’t fight back; she just squirmed and choked in his grip. But Johanna screamed and jumped across the closet at him, prying at his hands and trying to dislodge him.
“Jason, no! Don’t! Let her go!”
He felt the wave of anger drain from his body, and he backed down. He dropped his hands from Vandal’s neck, and she jerked away from him, massaging her throat and coughing as she tried to speak. “I’m sorry, Cain. I had no choice. I told you my situation. You know why I had to tell him. Nash swore he had nothing to do with the assault in Paris. It wasn’t him. And now that you know Monika is Treadstone, does it make any sense? Nash wouldn’t go after one of our own.”
“Nash is capable of anything.”
“Maybe, but not this,” Vandal insisted. “He didn’t do it.”
Downstairs, outside, Bourne heard more gunfire. He couldn’t wait any longer.
“Keep Johanna safe,” he told her.
He slung the StG4 into firing position and hurried down the cottage’s old stairs. He ignored the front door and ran the opposite way, locating a back door that led from the kitchen. Outside, he found a gate through the seawall at the rear of the garden, which took him to a trail running along the shallow cliff. Below him, angry waves crashed against the shore, and the bay was laced with whitecaps. The rain had finally stopped as dark clouds raced across the sky, but the wind nearly blew him off his feet.
Another shot cracked nearby. He could barely hear it as the gusts whistled.
Bourne crept to the end of the wall that bordered Monika’s house. There, he found an empty field, its long grass swirling. Ahead of him, against the night sky, he saw the dark silhouette of the Church of St. Mary. A flashlight beam swept across tall panels of stained glass; someone was in the churchyard. He inched forward, the rifle propped in the crook of his arm. At the end of the field, he climbed a low wall onto a path that led behind the church and into the cemetery. The high walls of St. Mary’s rose above his head, and he could hear the humming vibration of the bell in the steeple. Around him, moss-covered old headstones leaned toward the ground. He stayed low, switching his position from grave to grave. A muzzle flashed not far away, but whoever was there wasn’t firing at him. The bullet whipped the other way, toward the ruins of the medieval priory.
Someone moved. A man had been crouched behind one of the headstones, and now he stood up. His outline revealed a tall, lean man, a suppressed pistol in his hands. He was no more than thirty feet away. The man put his wrist near his mouth and whispered into a radio. His gun arm shifted, and Bourne heard a new magazine being snapped into the pistol. He narrowed the gap between them, timing his footsteps in the wet grass with the thunder of waves on the beach. He slipped the strap of the rifle over his neck and leaned the weapon against the nearest headstone.
He found his knife in its scabbard, still wet with blood, and he tensed, ready to spring.
Then, out of nowhere, the man fell. His body shivered, and he pitched face-first into the grass. Bourne scrambled forward and turned the man over by the shoulder. He found a single bullet hole neatly placed in the man’s forehead, a perfect kill shot.
Someone in the churchyard was on Bourne’s side.
Monika?
She was good with a gun. She was Treadstone.
He checked the body and found an earpiece for receiving instructions. Bourne took it and placed it in his own ear. For now, he heard nothing but empty static. He retrieved his rifle, then kept moving forward, using the headstones for protection. On his left was the arched doorway leading into the church, and ahead of him was the crumbling red façade of the old priory ruins. He kept looking for the shooter, but he saw no one.
Overhead, the clouds separated. The darkness lightened under a sliver of moon. He could see the land more clearly now, but that meant he was no longer an invisible target in the cemetery. As if to punctuate the threat, a shot careened off the stone near his head. He ducked down, barely escaping a barrage from the ruins. Muffled bursts from a suppressed pistol kicked up mud and mortar, but after half a dozen shots, the gun went silent.
Not far away, he heard a gasp of pain, and then a voice rose above the wind. “Fuck you, don’t—”
The voice cut off with the spit of another round. His unseen ally had made another kill.
Bourne dared to call out. “Monika?”
No one answered.
He checked the grounds but still saw no sign of his supposed partner. With his rifle at the ready, he continued his slow march toward the ruins. He reached the main tower, its façade worn by weather and time. A body lay outside the wrought-iron gates, this one with two bullet wounds, one in the chest, one in the neck. Another enemy down.
How many are there?
He slipped through the gate into what had once been the interior of the priory. Eroded fragments of archways and walls rose around him. In the distance, under the moonlight, he saw the dark expanse of the sea, a few boats in the island harbor, and the castle standing watch on the summit of the hill. A movement in the shadows drew his attention. He swung his rifle that way, his finger on the trigger. A man appeared near one of the priory’s stone columns, and Bourne saw that the man had one hand—his gun hand—high in the air. The other hand supported his weight on a cane.
Bourne recognized him immediately, just as the other man had recognized him. It was Nash Rollins.
He didn’t lower the rifle. Instead, he crossed the grass to Nash, finger still on the trigger and ready to fire. His Treadstone handler had blood on his face and hands. He looked old and tired leaning on his cane, his clothes wet, his gray hair limp on his head. But with Nash, looks were deceiving. Even one-handed, the man still had a sharpshooter’s aim, which he’d already demonstrated by making two kills in the darkness with a silenced Ruger.
“Where is she?” Bourne asked him. “Where’s Monika?”
Nash didn’t pretend not to know the score. “I sent her to the castle. One of the National Trust directors has family ties to MI5. He gave her a key to the property in case she needed a place to hide.”
“You lied to me in Switzerland. You called her an outsider. But she’s not.”
Nash shrugged. “I also told you to let it go and stop looking for her. You didn’t. And now you know things you were better off never knowing.”
“She’s Treadstone. She always was.”
“Of course.”
“What was her mission in Engelberg?” Bourne asked.
Nash said nothing.
“Was she after Le Renouveau?” Jason went on. “And if she was, why didn’t you have us work together?”
“That wasn’t her mission,” Nash replied curtly.
“Then why was she there? It can’t be a coincidence that she and I were in the same place at the same time.”
“That’s for Shadow to tell you, not me.”
“Shadow?”
“Her code name.”
Bourne raised the StG4 rifle and pointed it into Nash’s face. Not that he would fire. They both knew that. But Jesus, there were moments when he wanted to pull the trigger and end the games once and for all.
“You’re her handler, Nash. You know why Shadow was there. Tell me.”
“I’m not her handler. I never was. You have it backward, Cain.”
“What are you saying?”
“I report to Shadow. Or rather, I report to people who report to Shadow. She’s far above my pay grade.”
“What? You’re lying again.”
“I’m not. Shadow was David Abbott’s golden girl. Right from the beginning. Abbott loved you, Jason, of course he did. You had crazy skills, but we all knew you were meant to be in the field. You’d never make it as part of the deep state bureaucracy. You can’t make compromises. You can’t handle the shades of gray. But Shadow was born for that life. In fact, with Levi Shaw out of the way, I expect her to take over.”
“Take over? Take over what?”
“She’ll be the next head of Treadstone.”
Bourne heard those words and tried to absorb them. He tried to make sense of all of it. Monika Roth.
The next head of Treadstone.
David Abbott’s golden girl.
The roaring of memory whipped through his mind like the ocean wind. He had so many visions of that woman from his past.
Monika in his arms as he asked her to marry him. Monika breaking his heart with her lover at the Drei Alpenhäuser. Monika, hot and cold, real and false. And now Monika, a Treadstone agent at her refuge off the British coast, hiding from assassins at a medieval castle.
Monika. Shadow.
Not just Treadstone. The head of Treadstone. The master manipulator. The heir to David Abbott’s empire.
Bourne shoved the butt of the rifle into Nash’s neck, forcing the older man to take a stumbling step backward in surprise and lean into his cane. His voice rose into a threat. “Why was she in Switzerland? Goddamn it, Nash, tell me. What was her mission?”
Nash’s eyes looked like hard black pearls in the darkness.
“You were her mission.”
Jason felt his mind spinning. He found himself caught in a vortex of lies, a lifetime of lies, a centrifuge where the forces of gravity got heavier and heavier, pressing in on his skull. He blinked, a stabbing jolt of pain behind his eyes. He tried to breathe and could barely drag air into his lungs. The words echoed in his mind.
You were her mission.
All of the lies took shape in the man standing in front of him. He wanted to hurt him. Kill him. Bourne took a step toward Nash, and that single step saved his life. A bullet scorched past his head, so close that the heat burned him. Jason went to the ground, pulling Nash with him, but the old man came down too slowly. The next shot tunneled into the lean flesh of Nash’s side. He heard Nash swear in pain, and blood oozed through the man’s shirt and between his taut fingers.
More bullets blasted the ruined walls around them.
Three men.
Bourne spotted three men closing on them through the ruins of the priory. The barrage was ceaseless. He had nowhere to hide, and all he could do was stare into the fire and bring up the barrel of the Astra rifle. He was nothing but hard, furious death. He brought down the shooters one at a time, round after round with each pull of the trigger. They outnumbered him, but he had the advantage of a tsunami of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Six shots later, he took out the first man. Eight shots after that, the second fell. The third, watching his odds disintegrate, gave up the fight and ran for the church, but Bourne’s fire trailed him step by step and brought him down with a shot to the leg and then ten more shots that pummeled the fallen body.
Long after he knew the man was dead, he kept firing, his anger pouring out of him with the cracks of the rifle.
You were her mission.
Nash finally took hold of his arm and stopped him.
“Jason. Enough.”
Bourne lay back heavily against the stone column. He breathed hard, his nostrils flaring. He closed his eyes. The rifle in his arms felt hot to the touch. He didn’t want to move, but he had to move anyway. There was no time to stay in place. The shots of the Astra were loud; more men would be coming to get them.
He pushed himself to his feet, his legs unsteady. Nash lay propped against the ruins, blood everywhere.
“Get to the castle,” Nash told him in a weak voice. “You’ve got to save Shadow.”
“What about you?”
“Fuck me, Cain, you don’t like me anyway. And I’m not going to die. One shot can’t kill a son of a bitch like me. Go.”